


Some Kind of Future

by syllic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, M/M, Marriage of Emotional Constipation, Slow build (no thanks to Steve), Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Up all night to get Bucky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-10 12:00:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 48,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4391081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllic/pseuds/syllic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People always pity Steve for the wrong reasons (or, Steve is a big fat drama queen who couldn’t give people space if they showed him how with a restraining order).</p><p>Soulmate-mark AU with a twist.</p><p><i>For all the emotional smotherers out there—we all mean well—and especially for B, who asked the universe for (something like) this story.  Smother on, sister</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Kind of Future

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  I imagine this starts sometime after _Thor: The Dark World_ but before _Winter Soldier_ ; the reality of it exists slightly parallel to the MCU after that, though _Age of Ultron_ kinda sorta happens.
> 
> The hand-wavey soulmark stuff is drawn half from the MCU, half from the comics, probably with 63% accuracy throughout. (Disclaimer that complete fidelity to the multiple canons is not my primary objective. If it matters to you, Bucky in this universe did not train Natasha in the Red Room, and was mostly deployed as a HYDRA killing machine in the years between 1946 and 2011, spending minimum time awake.)
> 
> With enthusiastic thanks to S (who also has trouble not making the crazy eyes at people she likes) for the sweet beta read. She audienced, hand-held, gave direction, and generally made this possible. All remaining mistakes are mine.

  
  
One of the first things Steve realizes after they pull him from the ice is that people always pity him for the wrong reasons.

Most times it’s the great gaping valley that separates the time when he had things to call his own, things he was certain about, and the people who surround him now, when he’s still trying to find his feet in a world where nothing is familiar. People now, people in the brave new world, they assume Steve yearns for things that he could have never even known to wish for. Sometimes Steve starts to explain the impossibility of that, but the distance between his frame of reference and theirs usually makes it abundantly clear that it’s not the best use of anyone’s time.

Other times it’s that people are so caught up in the story of Captain America that they can’t comprehend the reality of Steven Grant Rogers. People pity Steve for all that he has lost but celebrate that he has a second chance; they don’t understand that for a chance to really count it has to feel green, alive, flowering, tentatively hopeful. Like butterflies in the stomach, or the sweet heady spin of an awkward dance (well, he imagines the dance part, anyway). Steve has known what a real chance feels like, and so far, nothing in the 21st century sounds or smells or looks or tastes like that.

In Steve’s opinion (vociferously contested by Peggy, to Steve’s absolute lack of surprise), it’s unlikely that something will feel like that for him again. He can’t say that, though, not unless he wants to take something away from people; it took Steve a few months to really understand it, but it turns out that one thing that is exactly the same as it was seventy years ago is that people still look to Captain America for hope. Steve’s confused by it, a little tentative: what do they think he can give them, when he barely understands the world they live in sometimes? But he’s ultimately happy to do his best to provide what they want, mostly because he believes in the inherent value of what they’re asking for.

Hope has made it possible for Steve to fight his whole life—fight his own lungs and bullies and Nazis and HYDRA, fight for Bucky and for Peggy and for Erskine—and he can’t really give up his belief in it, no matter how hard he tries. Hope is tied up in who he is, somehow, even in the endless parade of the unknown that is this new century. Once upon a time Steve had to learn the trick of drawing out a single good breath to feel like enough for a few minutes, and the skill comes in useful now: when scrounging up optimism feels particularly challenging, Steve hangs on to a good memory and makes an effort to be grateful.

Consciously, carefully grateful for Tony, an obnoxious and arrogant confirmation that Howard existed, that there will always be people who want to make cars fly, who want to crack the unknown open like an egg. 

For Peggy, skin paper-thin and brain razor-sharp, even when her body is drawing her mind to whatever place it goes when she’s not completely there. After all, Steve is the picture of health and youth but his mind goes, too. In some strange way they are closest in the times when she forgets, when she’s not sure what year she’s in, and he’s thankful for every minute he has with her. When he leaves her room, sometimes, the nurses look at him with kind, sad eyes (pitying eyes) and he smiles back brightly because—this is one of the few instances in which he is grateful for people’s incomprehension—they don’t understand. Peggy is a gift, almost especially so when she makes him feel raw and helpless: devastated, but _alive_.

He’s grateful for Natasha and Clint and Fury, Bruce, Thor, was even grateful for Loki; sometimes Steve thinks that if there were no enemies to fight, some unnamable part of him would break apart, leaving him more rudderless than he is now, a puppet without strings. He’s thankful for Loki’s madness, which drew the Avengers together, in its way. They’re no Howling Commandos but they are a team, and _team_ is how Steve understands the world.

He’s grateful for Thor’s commitment to his brother until the day he died. Thor, he thinks, understands what it’s like to look into the eyes of someone who is being taken away from you minute by minute and without whom you would be utterly lost. Sometimes when their eyes meet across the room Steve sees a gravity in Thor that echoes the sucking weight he feels inside his own chest. That’s a gift, too, the knowledge that the most vibrant man he knows is broken inside in a way that feels intimately familiar, for all they never speak of it. The knowledge that Thor may be broken that way but survives, survives to love and to laugh and to fight.

Steve is even, in a way, thankful to know that there is so much outside of his control, that there is so much he does not understand, so much he cannot begin to imagine, let alone influence. When Dr. Foster and Bruce talk about doorways to other realities, fingers flying over Tony’s World’s Fair screens, when Thor explodes into existence in the middle of an everyday intersection, booming laughter while Steve and Natasha and Barton are arguing approach tactics on some utterly mundane mission—in those moments of wonder sometimes Steve forgets to grieve.

This is Steve’s life now, stretches of gray lit by flashes of astonishment, marked by a frail optimism that the former may fade more fully into the latter one of these days. He knows better than to undervalue the moments that break up the monotony of grief. Steve may not understand half of what happens in this new life of his, but he doesn’t have to: he just has to know that his heart is a tiny thing in a tiny part of a vast universe that contains worlds within worlds, that his loss is infinitesimal in the scheme of things. That stars apparently fall inwards and disappear, but that in collapsing they explode outward into the dust that makes up the universe.

He relishes all the moments that remind him of that.  
  


…

 

 

The day that Thor tells them about the marks is a flash-of-wonder day until it isn’t. They’re sitting in one of Tony’s living rooms, a rare moment of quiet in the ballroom-sized space, when Thor rattles onto the balcony outside. Natasha and Steve are actually on their way home after a mission; Fury needed her to ask Tony for help with something or another, so they stopped by the tower on the way back to D.C. When they hear Thor arrive Steve’s picking cement out of his hair and trying to be surreptitious about dropping it on Tony’s carpet and Tony is doing something incomprehensible with three tablets, switching between them at breakneck speed and muttering to himself. At the sound of Thor’s boots on the tile Tony furrows his brows and flicks his eyes toward the panel that conceals one of the suits before pasting a grin on his face and going out to the balcony.

“My friend!” Thor roars, picking Tony up off the ground as he hugs him.

“All right, all right, easy—you’re like a Nordic, manic-depressive version of Mr. T that is _always manic_ , Jesus F. Christ,” says Tony. 

Steve smiles—it’s a reflex, but he smiles wider when he realizes he mostly gets it—and stands up to say hello.

“Steven Rogers! The Lady Natasha!” Thor continues to rumble. Thor always reminds Steve of having to memorize “Charge of the Light Brigade” at school, of Sister Agnes telling him to clasp his hands behind his back and thrust his chest forward and, “ _Declaim_ , Mr. Rogers, Alfred Lord Tennyson did not write for mutterers” while Bucky made faces at him from their desk.

Steve catches a glint of a smile in Natasha’s eye as Thor grasps Steve’s forearm and squeezes enthusiastically, and he wonders what the 1990s Russian equivalent of poetry that was not written for mutterers was, and if Natasha had to learn it, once.

“What brings you to my humble abode?” Tony asks Thor.

Steve’s not quite sure how, but it’s clear from the way Tony says it that he’s not talking about the tower—he’s talking about Earth. Steve looks off to the side so they mostly can’t see him before rolling his eyes aggressively.

“I have come!” Thor says. He cuts himself off abruptly, shifting uncomfortably on his feet, like Steve when he forgot the beginning of the third stanza (“Every time, Stevie, _every time_ ; how hard can it be to remember cannons? They’re the best part!”). “Ah. Well, I should say. I— I have come on a matter that is…” 

The completely uncharacteristic hesitation snaps Steve out of the memory and to attention. He sees Natasha and Tony tense too.

“There is no cause for alarm, my friends,” Thor says. It’s clear that he senses their unease and is trying to come across as unthreatening, appeasing, which in Steve’s considered opinion probably means there’s significant fucking cause for alarm.

“Why don’t we sit,” Tony says, tightly. 

Thor nods, a weirdly hangdog expression on his face, before gingerly lowering himself into a minimalist armchair. Steve is hoping this is not the I-have-another-insane-brother-I-never-told-you-about kind of hangdog expression when Thor says,

“Do you know of Heimdall?”

“Dude who runs the inter-world expressway—which it’s a crime to withhold from physicists on Earth, by the way—claims he can see ten trillion souls, has an eye on every sparrow, probably selling one-way tickets to Valhalla and funtown when Odin isn’t looking, or would be if he had any business sense, that Heimdall?” says Tony.

“I am not aware if Heimdall knows of this Town of Fun,” says Thor, slowly, “But yes, that is he of whom I speak. He sees all.”

Steve vaguely remembers something about this from a briefing: he committed it to memory but filed it under ‘Do not strictly need to know’, and the details are slow to emerge from some murky back room of his brain. He also remembers a conversation with Dr. Foster about Thor’s first visit to Earth, which incidentally was ten times more informative than S.H.I.E.L.D.’s ‘comprehensive’ briefing.

“Has something happened to the Bifrost again?” Natasha asks, and it takes Steve another long moment to place the word. 

He picks some more cement out of his hair, distractedly asking his brain to dig at the place where he knows he stored away all this information but willing to let them talk around him for now. He’s mostly at his best once all the relevant information is on the table, anyway. Man with a plan, all that jazz.

“No,” Thor says. “The reconstruction holds, heedless of any strife in the Nine Realms. The news I bring concerns another of Heimdall’s duties. He has for many ages been the guardian of the Soul Gem.”

Steve really wishes they could find less ridiculous names for things. He loves the vast awareness of the universe that being an Avenger has given him, without a doubt, but dear god, naming is not their collective strong point. He meets Tony’s eyes where he’s sitting on the opposite end of the couch and can somehow tell he’s thinking the same thing.

“The ‘soul gem’?” asks Natasha. She clearly agrees, too.

“It is one of the Infinity Stones,” Thor says.

“Oh, no, that’s definitely super helpful and clear,” says Tony.

Natasha snorts and Thor smiles indulgently. “The Soul Gem is one of the Infinity Stones,” he repeats. “As is the stone contained within the Tesseract, and the stone in… the scepter that my brother wielded, the scepter that is lost. And the Aether is a manifestation of another of the six.”

“Ooookay, I still have no idea what you just said, but if we’re going by word association, I don’t think I like it,” says Tony, jaw clenched around the flippant delivery.

“As abashed as I am by what I must reveal, I promise you that I do not bring news of war or strife, Tony Stark,” says Thor, holding his hands out in front of him, solemn. “You need not brace for hardship. But I do come with news that will affect life on Midgard, and all Midgardians. I hope in a way that makes many Midgardian hearts glad.”

“Is there something you’re not saying here? I sense there’s something you’re not saying here,” says Tony. “You’re saying ‘happy Midgardian hearts’ but your eyes say, ‘Holy fucking shitballs’. Could you maybe just spit it out? I can’t say I have a lot of faith in Asgardians’ ideas of what would make life on Earth better, and I’d rather just move on to the fixing part of things, much as I love a good dramatic delivery. Honestly, buddy, I’m not even sure you have the pizzazz for it. Too much gravitas up there in Asgard, or something.”

Steve cuts him a quelling look and Tony goes quiet, though he still looks a little crazy around the eyes, as Natasha would say.

“Right. Well. I… I was simply trying to ensure that Jane knew that she alone holds my heart!” says Thor, suddenly, one hand going up to rub at the back of his neck and his face coloring with a dull flush.

Steve wants to ask about the seeming non sequitur, but he’s too struck by the sight of a red-faced Thor to say anything. Steve still blushes at the slightest provocation, despite everything, but the others, through some combination of training and shamelessness, never do. He finds he wants to remember this moment. 

“Uh-huh…?” says Natasha, only the flicker of her eyelids betraying her impatience.

“The Soul Gem sees all souls. It can read the truth of a person, the heart of his or her desires, the most elevated of her hopes and the basest of his faults,” Thor says. It sounds as if he’s repeating something he’s been told many times. “It can of course also see when two souls resonate, when they are fated to find each other in this world and perhaps in the next. I knew it would recognize the love I have for Jane, and I thought perhaps it could show her that my every return to Midgard is hoped for, that I long for her when I am not here. My absence after the loss of the Bifrost was not without consequences, despite my Jane’s forgiving heart.”

Thor looks at Tony hopefully, and Tony, seemingly despite himself, offers a sympathetic nod. Not for the first time Steve wonders why no one ever looks to him for the manly bonding moments. It’s not as if he doesn’t know from romantic failures; who do they imagine he is, exactly? 

“So despite Heimdall’s misgivings I offered the stone unfettered access to my soul,” Thor says, speaking less haltingly now, clearly heartened by Tony’s show of support, “And asked it, in return, to help me provide a… visible manifestation of my devotion, of my certainty that Jane and I are meant to share this life. Heimdall warned me that the gem has a mind of its own, that it cannot be fully controlled by he who wields it. I was foolish not to listen. It seems I may not ever fully outgrow my foolishness.”

A distant, yearning look passes over Thor’s features, almost too quick to catch.

“The gem read my wish for a visible mark, and it perceived that my mind was fixed on Midgard. It saw that I wished to speak to Jane of my love, to have her recognize something of what I feel for her. But I am afraid I was not able to guide the gem to contain my wish to Jane and me alone.”

Thor holds out his left arm, underside up, where a surprisingly subtle tattoo spells **I love you, but you’re a fucking idiot** in confident black lines.

“I came to explain to Jane what I had asked from the Gem, but even as I was speaking I could feel the power of the stone gathering, that something I had not foreseen was taking place. It recognized me, it saw Jane, and it marked us both with the first words we spoke to each other after it was done. When we saw Darcy some time later she, too, was marked. Erik Selvig as well, and the Intern Ian, too. I believe the stone will mark all Midgardians in this way, with the words of those they share a soul-space with.” Thor spreads his hands helplessly again, an utterly un-Thorlike gesture, the stark black **idiot** drawing Steve’s eye as his mind spins. “You must understand, I did not intend for this to happen, my friends. But I believe my deep love of this realm made the gem read my wish as applicable to all Midgardians, not just Jane. It will mark all of you with the words of your beloveds, your sword-brothers and sisters, whoever your soul is destined to recognize in this and other realms, perhaps beyond death, beyond time. It will identify those who may be destined to walk their lives together, as lovers or family or the deepest of friends. It could be… a gift.”

He winces slightly as he says it, as if he regrets the words almost immediately.

“I’m sorry; I’m sorry.” Tony is waving his hands in a _slow down_ gesture, his face pale with anger. “Let me get this straight. Are you saying you’ve doomed every person on Earth to a mark on their body that supposedly ties them to some other poor sucker? That you’ve given us all some true-love-bullshit tattoo, something that we’re supposed to hope for but which will probably end up being a permanent reminder of some way in which we’ve fucked up? You know the rule about relationship tattoos, right? It has to transcend worlds, come on. That shit is a sure-fire fucking _jinx_. And not all of us have girlfriends with names that make a smooth transition to ‘wino forever’, man.”

Thor tries to say something, but Tony rolls right over him. “Of aaaaaall the problems that you people have brought us, this takes the motherfucking cake. ‘Soul Gem’ tattoos? This world invented Lisa Frank for a reason, asshole. We didn’t ask for your help! We mess up with the people we love all on our own; we don’t need Asgardian voodoo to help us along. And ‘beyond death, beyond time’? Maybe that flies up there in the land of no quantum physics and Soul Gems and your brothe— _people_ giving birth to My Little Pony, but that doesn’t sound like something anyone wants down here! Does it? Well, does it?”

Tony turns to Steve, then Natasha, and Steve wonders if they can all see the strange, raw desire in Tony’s eyes, belying his words, or if that’s something only someone else who can’t bring himself to put what he wants into words can recognize.

“I do not think the Soul Gem would mark you with hurtful words, Man of Iron,” Thor says, unbearably gentle and understanding. Not just Steve, then. “My wish was pure, if misguided; I do not think the stone will corrupt it in such a way.”

Tony shakes his head dismissively, scoffing, and stomps over to the computers in the corner of the room. He’s telling Jarvis to pull everything S.H.I.E.L.D. has on Asgard, on the Soul Gem “or on any other Gems or Stones or whatever the fuck; this is totally not the last of our problems, Jarvis, my man”, and Steve is almost too busy watching the sharp movements of his hands to see Natasha slowly tugging on the zipper on the sleeve of her uniform, her face impassive. 

Steve immediately turns his gaze to her, rapt, aware that he should let her have this private moment but unable to. His mother’s disapproving stare is in his mind’s eye, the feel of Bucky cuffing him on the back of the head, but he _can’t look away_.

 **Well, I didn’t need no goddamned tattoo to tell me you were my family, Nat** , her forearm says. Slightly above that, in letters that look less like chicken-scratch, a half-spiral on her bicep says, _**I can’t imagine how this will work**_.

Natasha looks at her arm with wide eyes, saying nothing. She’s completely still, either contemplative or shocked. Steve can’t decide.

Suddenly Steve’s own arm feels as if it is burning, but he abruptly decides he won’t—he _can’t_ —draw his sleeve back right now, no matter how desperately his arm tingles. Tony is stealing violent glances at Thor and at Natasha’s arm in between looking at his screens, and Thor meets his gaze, shamefaced, trying and failing to hunch his shoulders into something smaller than their massive bulk.

“I am afraid there is nothing on this in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s databases, sir,” Jarvis’ disembodied voice says, startling as always. “Not even Director Fury’s encrypted ones. Would you like me to start a search elsewhere?”

Tony doesn’t answer out loud; he shakes his head and looks fixedly at the floor, something almost childlike in the slump of his spine. Jarvis must see him, because he does not ask anything else.

Tony’s eyes glitter, and he goes to pull his sleeve back once, twice, letting his arm fall but then reaching out again as if he can’t help it. He finally wrenches at the sleeve of his Henley with one defiant yank, and Steve sees the words and Tony’s smile as he hears the ding of the elevator and the sound of Virginia Potts’ furious, raised voice,

**What the hell is wrong with you, Tony? You can’t just have someone _tattooed_ against their will!**

“For once, this wasn’t my fault, Pepper!” Tony says, face caught in some strange rictus of horror and ecstasy. Ms. Potts holds up her own left arm accusingly, **my fault** scrawled on the underside of her delicate wrist, letters twisting around in either direction.

He goes to her, an explanation already tumbling out of his mouth at his usual speed, and Steve watches, still inexplicably numb and motionless, as Thor approaches Natasha and softly trails a long finger along one of the lines on her arm.

“Two marks are a blessing indeed,” he says, sadly. “The sign of a generous soul.” 

Natasha gives him one unfamiliar vulnerable look before zipping her sleeve closed again.

“One is darker than the other,” she says, business-like. “The family one.”

Thor nods gravely. “Heimdall believes the darkness of the mark may represent how likely the two souls are to find happiness, strength in each other. Sometimes we are connected most intimately to people we cannot bring ourselves to love, who cannot bring themselves to love us. People who would love us, if they could find their way to us, but who cannot. For whatever reason.”

He rubs one palm roughly along his bicep, and Steve is not sure he would be able to see the **You weren’t expecting this, were you, _brother_?** there if it weren’t for his enhanced eyesight. It is the faintest of marks, more the suggestion of script against his skin than actual lettering. Steve feels one pang of pure, unadulterated compassion for him, for them. He wonders if his mark will also look like that, a scar-like webbing of the words of the dead. He thinks it might.

“We are not simple creatures, and our souls are not simple things,” Thor says. “These marks are a possibility of connection, not a certainty. Heimdall believes the depth of their color might reflect that.”

Steve is distracted from the unwanted prickle of his eyes by Tony and Ms. Potts coming to join them near the couches. Tony still has the flush of anger on his cheeks, but his hand is clasped tightly with Ms. Potts’, and Steve thinks there is something joyful in the tightness of their grip.

“You think everyone on Earth will get the marks, Thor?” Ms. Potts asks.

“I do,” Thor answers. “Heimdall does. And Jane, too, after her own conversation with Heimdall. Anyone whose soul is open to another in this way will receive the marks. Each will have to decide if their mark will be a gift for them, or a curse. Jane believes the marking will happen quickly, as the Gem identifies more and more Midgardians through the connections that bind you together. It began with Jane and me and my wish, but Darcy and Erik received their marks shortly after. We went to consult with Heimdall, who also thought it would move forward from there, to our friends and then beyond, outward from my original request of the stone, but even as I came here I saw signs in the streets of marks appearing on others. It has only been a few hours since I first came to Jane.”

Steve and Natasha were busy taking two highly unsavory characters into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody a few hours ago. Steve hadn’t had any reason to look at his arm; why would he? He looks down at his dirty sleeve now and wonders.

“Cap?” Natasha says, careful, and Steve looks at her and the others for a long moment before warily drawing his sleeve up his arm, the material of the uniform just barely giving way. 

He’s almost sure there will be nothing there, and he feels strangely vindicated as he bares his blank forearm for everyone to see. Then he catches the pale shadow of a gray letter near the crook of his elbow. He pulls harder, careful not to rip the material. He somehow knows he will want to be able to hide this again once he has seen it.

 **Who the hell is Bucky?** , the mark says, in angry, cramped lettering, and Steve watches Natasha take in the barely visible gray before she says, quietly,

“I’m sorry.”

All Steve can think is that this imagined person whose soul he is supposed to recognize on the deepest of levels is someone who does not even know who Bucky is. Someone who does not know the name of the man who first made Steve feel like there might be a place for him in the world outside his tiny family of two. Bucky, with his easy grin and roughhouse affection, was the first person other than Steve’s mother who made Steve feel worthy of something—no, he corrects himself, trying to be more specific despite how much it hurts: the first person who made Steve feel worthy of love. Bucky pushed Steve to run despite his weak lungs and dragged him home after; Bucky sent off Steve’s portfolio to Auburndale without telling him and came home with the scholarship letter a few months later; Bucky went across the world and Steve followed and after that Bucky walked with him and fought with him and fell for him. Bucky loved him.

Steve looks at his mark and can barely register the faintness of the color, finds he honestly doesn’t care. He can only see a damning, terrible confirmation that this world has nothing for him, not in any way that really means something. **Who the hell is Bucky?** What does it matter if the mark is so faded? Any person who does not know Bucky is not someone Steve can imagine sharing a life with.

Distantly he registers that this is a stupid thought. Who knows Bucky, who knows Peggy, who knows anyone he knew, now, after all? All the people Steve shares a world with now are ignorant of the life he once had, the one that meant something—but that realization does nothing to alleviate the deep, yawning hollowness that opens up inside Steve at the sight of the barely-there lettering. **Who the hell is Bucky?**

“I’m really sorry, Steve,” Natasha repeats, watching him trace the words, and though the others do not say anything he can tell they are thinking the same thing she is, that the faintness of his mark is a symbol of yet another thing Steve is losing, or perhaps has already lost. 

Steve smiles at Natasha, shrugging. She cannot possibly know what he is thinking, or why he feels as hopeless as he does, but her face says she feels compassion for him, nonetheless: of course she does. 

People always pity Steve for the wrong reasons.  
  


…

 

Steve had known that Tony could sell sawdust to a lumber mill, but it is only in the aftermath of the soulmarks, as people begin to call them almost straight away, that he truly understands the kind of power Tony has over other people when he’s at his most charming.

Tony convinces S.H.I.E.L.D. to let Stark Industries’ people handle the whole thing (“Listen, Nick, if ever there was a situation that called for loving, not fighting, _this is it_. And you, my dashing friend, are not of the former persuasion. Which is not to say I doubt your skills in the bedroom, you one-eyed Casanova you”). Within two weeks Steve watches the panic over the marks not only recede but transform itself into a proprietary joy the likes of which he hasn’t seen since YouTube videos of the end of the war that Jarvis ‘queued up’ for him, with people thronging the piers for a taste of the victory.

Under Tony’s direction the marks go from intimidating invasions of privacy, a threatening reminder of how vulnerable Earth is to outside forces, to a cherished symbol of humans’ unique capacity for love.

It’s Tony, Thor, and Dr. Foster who first go on television to explain what has happened, with all the parts about Thor’s infatuated commitment to Jane left in but all the menacing elements of a half-sentient stone of power left out. Tony calls the marks a gift of Asgard, a physical representation of humanity’s greatest power—people’s connection to each other. He proudly displays his own mark and is self-effacing when he says it’s a better mark than he deserves, glancing shyly at Ms. Potts in the wings in a way that would seem calculated to Steve if he didn’t know Tony meant it.

Tony doesn’t let people write their own story about the marks. It should bother Steve, the manipulation, but it’s so skillfully done that he’s mostly left feeling overwhelmed, partly in a good way. Tony reminds Steve not only of Howard but also of Bucky, sometimes (“Come on, Steve, it will be fun!” and Steve somehow feeling convinced that it _would_ , despite the crushing and overwhelming evidence to the contrary), and it’s hard not to like him for it.

Within a few days there’s a wealth of information out there—mostly based on what Heimdall has been willing to tell them, but some completely fabricated by Stark Industries with the sole purpose of “directing the response”, as Maria Hill puts it when Steve protests—and Tony somehow becomes the poster boy for a thing he had no hand in and, honestly, only barely understands. Steve knows the feeling, though he does not remember sharing Tony’s enthusiasm for it.

Wherever Steve looks, there’s Tony providing sound bites about how soulmarks are not necessarily romantic, but coyly reminding people that they often are; Tony, who Steve had thought did not really trust anyone, telling people all about the ways in which two people can come together, and telling the world to cherish each way in which people connect; Tony, out of the suit and comfortable in a way Steve hasn’t ever seen him. Whoever this man is, he’s incredibly unfamiliar around the edges.

When Tony speaks about the potential power of the marks it is easy to believe him, because he himself seems transformed by what, Steve supposes, can be read as a confirmation of one’s place in the world, when everything goes right. Tony’s ease and his palpable joy become the compass around which the world orients its reaction, and though there is no shortage of people calling the marks the devil’s work among the celebration, well—Steve has found that there’s never any shortage of people who can find the devil’s work in something.

Steve recognizes that this is partly Tony throwing himself on the grenade, committed to protecting Earth in this as he was in deflecting the Chitauri attack, but that doesn’t take away from a sincere undertone of emotion that is a part of him now, since the mark. A genuine aspect of him that he’s somehow able to share openly with the world, something Steve never would have thought possible. More tellingly, it’s something that shines out of Tony in private, now, when no one is looking but his friends, half of whom had a hand in the whole business and don’t need Tony to put on an act to explain it.

Tony blazes them through it, and as he’s smiling on morning television Stark Industries is funding the launch of a global database of matched marks, for those who wish to participate; SI is designing arm bands and sleeves for those who don’t wish to reveal their marks, made out of the same abuse-resistant fabric as most S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms and priced accessibly; the Stark Foundation legal team is working on potential implications of the marks, using them to further dialogue about marriage equality and develop precedent in family and employment law that “better supports increasingly diverse connections between people”, as Tony says at their fundraiser. Steve sees Pepper’s able hand in a lot of it, but she and Tony work so seamlessly as a team that that, too, becomes a strange confirmation for some that the marks must be right in some cosmic way. Steve doesn’t see anything too different between them since the appearance of their marks except Tony’s fierce joy—but then again that’s no small thing.

Steve goes to see Peggy a couple of days after his mark appears, and while he won’t admit it to himself he’s maybe hoping she might be confused when he enters, that she might ask him who Bucky was. She’s clear-eyed and utterly lucid and probably wouldn’t have used “hell” even if she hadn’t been: her mouth has always been both sharper and more restrained than that, Steve knows.

Peggy’s arm is unmarked. After an inquisitive moment, turning her arm in one direction and then the other, Steve finds himself oddly unsurprised by this, almost as if he’d known it would be the case.

“I’ve never needed anyone else to complete me,” Peggy says, the formidable Agent Carter through and through. “Which is not to say that my life has not been irrevocably changed by wonderful souls.”

She pats his hand and they smile at each other, and Steve knows that it’s true: the two of them have spent what parts of their lifetimes they could intertwined with each other, maybe not because the universe intended them to but because they _wanted_ it. That a skinny boy from Brooklyn could have found his way to Rebirth, that she had climbed the ranks against the odds and been there to meet him, that they had chosen to recognize each other as kindred spirits and pursue that, rather than just acknowledging it—that’s powerful, too. Steve knows that in his marrow, in a way that’s deeper than any mark on his skin, Soul Gem or not.

Peggy is too kind a person, and too amazing a lady, to ask Steve to show her his arm after he’s seen hers, but Steve has nothing he would hide from this woman. He unbuttons his cuff and bares his skin.

“All that speculation about what Captain America has on his arm,” she says, softly. “I’m surprised you made it here in one piece without someone tearing your clothes off in the street.”

Steve doesn’t tell her that since the marks he’s gotten the sense every day that if it weren’t for the fact that people know he could turn all of them aside through sheer physical force if he needed to, this would have happened to him already. Judging by her smile, she knows.

“You know, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Steven. It could be a blessing,” she says, finally, after a long minute of examining his mark. Because of course she knows this, too. With a single look she’s understood exactly what Steve feels every time he looks at his arm, without him having to say anything. “It could be the chance to tell someone all about him. To keep him alive longer, through your memories of him. For as long as your life lasts, and maybe beyond.”

It’s a surprisingly compelling way to think about it. Not quite enough to ease the bitterness Steve feels when he looks at the mark, or the strange despondency he associates with it, but it’s something. She’s right—she almost always is—and Steve stores her insight away.

“You worry me sometimes, Steve,” she continues, releasing his arm from her gentle grip. She’s clearly not expecting him to say anything about Bucky; she probably knows his throat is too tight for it. “I think this is so light half because of whatever is happening on the other end of it, half because of you.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he admits. He never lies to her, not even when she’s confused and it might be easier for her if he did. She would hate that.

She tuts at him. “That’s silly, Steve. The world has taken enough from you; you don’t have to help it along.”

Steve shrugs, hoping to communicate _what can you do when everyone you know is dead and you’re broken inside_ with the gesture, and he’s only mildly startled when she laughs in his face.

“What is it like, I wonder,” she says, “To narrate your life to yourself in this tone of high drama all the time?”

“Lonely,” he says, smiling ruefully, and she nods to acknowledge his honesty, at least, visibly restraining herself from adding something else.

They look at his mark together until finally she says, “I hope, for your sake, that this will get darker in time. And for my sake if not for yours, given that the world gave you an extra seventy years when I would have used them better, you should do your best to make sure it does.”

Steve nods gravely, doing his cuff back up and taking her hand again. He’ll take orders from this woman as long as she’s willing to give them, even when he can’t even begin to imagine how to follow them.

He does not tell her that the mark is already a little darker than it was when it first appeared, as if somewhere, whoever his mystery person is is slowly coming around to the idea of Steve. Or as if Steve has more hope in him than he thinks.  
  
  
  
Steve doesn’t think it’s his imagination that Peggy begins to fade more quickly after that, as if the confirmation that the possibility of a life in this time exists somewhere out there for Steve relieves her in some way. He suspects that if he ever told her this she would call him a self-centred arse, but he also knows that she does love him more than well enough to tie part of her life to his, whether he’s an ass or not. Judging from past experience, maybe _because_ he’s an ass.

He buys more long-sleeved t-shirts and becomes more attached to his jackets, even on warm days. He doesn’t really speak to anyone but Peggy about his mark, though he knows there is an almost rabid curiosity about it, entire webpages devoted to it on the internet and a _telenovela_ about it on Venezuelan TV, or so Barton gleefully informs him. Tony keeps sending him Venezuelan iTunes certificates for _El Corazón del Capitán_ and Steve keeps ignoring them. He has an awful feeling Tony is going to somehow be involved in ensuring the show survives into eternity.

Peggy sometimes forgets she’s already seen Steve’s mark, or she forgets about marks entirely—probably because she doesn’t have one herself. Steve never tires of showing his to her when she asks, because even though it hurts there’s something therapeutic about the fact that she comes to the same conclusion about it that she did that first time, every time. This could be an opportunity, Steve, she says, and through some combination of her certainty and his stubborn belief in her he begins to edge himself toward accepting it.

“You should bring that Bucky Bear Stark found you on eBay into Accounts later this month; there’s someone there with a mark that includes the word ‘ma’am’ on her arm, and I’m pretty sure she’s hoping against hope that it’s you who is going to say that to her, and make all her Gatsby-wedding dreams come true,” Natasha tells him.

“Uh-huh,” Steve says, hurling the shield toward a shadow at the end of the warehouse and pushing Natasha out of the way of a spray of bullets. 

(He briefly considers saying something about being a toddler when F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby but quickly gives it up as a lost cause: he finds most young people these days think everything before 1965 was the 1920s.)

Natasha is always joking about his mark, constantly coming up with increasingly contrived scenarios in which Steve’s soulmate reveals him or herself to Steve through some Bucky-related circumstance. Steve thinks it’s mutually understood that they both joke about the marks to each other so they never find themselves in a situation where they have to discuss them for real. Steve barely knows who she is, most days—sometimes he thinks they could be closer if they were both less afraid, but she’s not that trusting and he’s not willing to take that risk, so the thought ends up being neither here nor there.

Sometimes he also wonders what it would be like if they actually were to talk about it: do her marks darken and fade like his? Is whatever is on the other end of hers as changeable as whatever is on the end of his? He knows her **family** mark is set dark as can be into her skin; sometimes she’s careless about it showing, and he’s pretty sure she knows to whom the corresponding mark belongs. The other mark she’s guarded with, careful. He understands her perfectly, and is happy to stand between her and the S.T.R.I.K.E. team on the rare occasions that they stress the uniforms beyond what they can handle and some strategic rip appears high on her arm.

Steve knows that part of whatever makes his mark change must be him; Peggy’s right. But once, over a period of about a week, when nothing remarkable was happening in his life, his mark got darker and darker and darker every day. By the end of it he almost felt expectant despite himself. Then, abruptly, just as Steve was considering allowing himself to really hope, it faded to almost nothing in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, as if the connection on the other end had suddenly snapped shut.

He remembers thinking that that was a pretty good commentary on giving the mark more weight than it was due, and he’s adjusted his views accordingly. 

This is what he tells himself, anyway, whenever he feels a strange warmth at the sight of more color seeping slowly into the crook of his arm.

Thankfully, Venezuelan soap opera aside, there is now an almost sacrosanct respect for the privacy of the marks, for those who do not wish to reveal them. The secrecy is a blessing for Steve, a safe, manageable space in which to exist, though he does try to listen to Peggy’s—and Natasha’s, less serious but equally insistent—advice to keep looking, to at least try to exist outside that comfort zone. (“I didn’t say ‘comfort zone’; I said, ‘Don’t be such a fucking coward, Rogers’,” Peggy tells him.)

Steve meets people. Not a lot of people, but he meets people. He even keeps his ears pricked for an unlikely first exchange, though he tells himself that he isn’t doing anything of the sort.

In the spring he finds himself running next to an incredibly attractive man with an easy smile several mornings in a row. On a morning of the third week (Steve never said he was quick about anything) he tries to goad him to speak, though how he imagines that ‘Who the hell is Bucky’ could possibly come from letting the man know he’s passing on his left, all twelve times he does it, he’d be hard-pressed to answer. (Steve also never said the serum did anything about his clinical awkwardness.)

Sam doesn’t magically utter the right words—of course he doesn’t—but that doesn’t stop Steve feeling like there’s something there, vibrant and thrumming just below the surface.

Thing is, lately Steve’s found himself coming around to a cautious sort of hope about building himself some kind of 21st-century life. (“Tell me, Steve, do you actually spend all your free time reading Gothic fiction from the Russian Empire by candlelight? Or do you develop these charmingly depressive descriptors all by yourself?” “What’s depressing about cautious hope, Peggy? It’s hope!”) He continues to protest to Natasha that he has no time or inclination for dating, and whatever inclination he has is mild at best, to be fair, but he _does_ sometimes catch himself now wanting things that he didn’t, before. 

He often thinks of Tony, altered irrevocably by a simple slash of letters appearing on his arm, and has to accept that for him, too, there’s been something transformative about his mark. That a phrase on his skin had power to thaw something in him after the ice when so many other things didn’t seems ridiculous, but Steve supposes he doesn’t have to understand it for it to be true.

He’s thinking about just this as he’s trying to work himself up to invite Sam out to lunch, and Sam is looking like he’s going to take him up on it, which is of course when Natasha appears out of nowhere to drag him to S.H.I.E.L.D. But he and Sam look at each other like two men who are going to be finding each other later, and Steve finds he isn’t even really upset by Natasha interrupting him to drag him away for a mission. Throwing himself out of an airplane will feel good after this, arms spreading in the air like wings.

“How are you not a broken weeping thing right now?” Natasha asks him at Sam’s house a few days later, after the world has gone FUBAR. “I’ve been trained never to be that, and I’m having to fight pretty hard to resist the urge.”

Steve shrugs. This seems like the latest in a long line of unfortunate clusterfucks (a word he learned from Tony but will not admit he uses, not to anyone but himself), but there’s some part of him that’s stuck on the fact that there’s something inside of him that’s able to bear it better than he would have thought he could. Peggy isn’t wrong when she calls him self-centered, but right now it’s helpful in the best of ways.

“There have been very few constants in my life since I woke up, other than loss,” he tells Natasha. “This makes more sense to me than you’d think.”

“Dramatic,” she says. 

She’s raising her beautiful eyebrows in what seems to be genuine surprise at his honesty, and perhaps a little amusement, and she reminds him so much of Peggy in that moment that it hurts.

“Do you two want something to eat?” Sam asks, appearing in the doorway and leaning against it like he’s not fazed at all to have them both half-naked in his bedroom, marks out as if the two of them aren’t notoriously private about them the rest of the time.

Steve and Natasha nod and as the three of them are trudging toward the kitchen Steve is again struck by the realization that while loss is not unexpected to him, what is sweetly unanticipated is the slow bloom of trust between him and Natasha, the warm presence that is Sam and the promise that they are both becoming important to him, not in principle but somewhere deep inside. The last time he acquired two friends within a few days of each other he thinks Bucky bribed two boys in the schoolyard to play with them and tried to hide the exact cost of said relationship in marbles from Steve.

In some ways Steve supposes Natasha is right that there can’t possibly be a worse situation than realizing HYDRA has been behind whatever has rubbed his instincts raw at S.H.I.E.L.D. since he woke up. Steve opens his eyes in his bed every day and finds that he’s tired and stretched thin and quietly sad as a baseline, and this seems like one more thing designed to push him to stay under the sheets. But it also seems he’s somehow learning to live with that weight without feeling like it’s all pressing him down into the ground until he can’t breathe, one asthma cigarette (Steve snorts at the memory) away from suffocating to death.

Natasha glances at him inquisitively; Steve shakes his head and waves her on.

Steve could be as lost as he felt two years ago, a year ago, maybe even last month. _That_ , on top of everything else, would be a worse situation than realizing HYDRA has been behind whatever has rubbed his instincts raw at S.H.I.E.L.D. since he woke up.

“If the world is changing,” he tells Natasha and Sam while they all shove large forkfuls of eggs into their mouths in Sam’s tiny kitchen, “And I think it’s pretty clear that it _is_ —we’re going to have to change with it.”

They both nod like people who know better than to push for more than that at this very moment, though he likes to think that they both will, later. That they know they’re allowed.

They’re planning to steal Sam’s wings and bring down Pierce. The eggs taste buttery in his mouth, black pepper tickling his nose. The mark is darker. Things are different.

Steve meets Bucky on a bridge.  
  


…

 

To say that he does not handle the situation well would be an understatement of the gravest magnitude.

He finally looks up in the armored truck to realize that he’s managed to fuck up so thoroughly that he, Sam, and Natasha are probably headed to certain death at the end of a HYDRA rifle. He feels a sharp pang at the thought of the three of them buried in a shallow grave, or maybe executed like traitors for Pierce to parade in front of others—Steve is no stranger to death, and obviously Natasha and Sam aren’t either, but they feel young to him in a way that means it was ultimately his responsibility to protect them.

“This wasn’t your fault, Steve,” Natasha says, and she’s huffing her breath out of her nose at him as if she’s disgusted at what he’s thinking, as if she knows.

“Yeah, no,” says Sam, glancing at the two guards with a predatory look in his eyes.

Steve can’t think. He can’t do anything beyond replaying Bucky’s angry, confused face over and over in his mind’s eye, an obsessive film reel for one.

The worst thing—not worse than the thought of Natasha’s fire being put out, of the light fading from Sam’s eyes, but close—is his mark, dancing crazily between a dark granite and a subtle, misty gray. It looks like a tired light bulb that’s about to go out, and Steve can’t tear his eyes away from it.

His jacket’s been taken and his arm is exposed above HYDRA’s reinforced cuffs; Sam and Natasha don’t say anything, but he can see them looking at the mark, too. He thinks that, more than anything, convinces them that he’s not going insane when he tells them it was Bucky on the bridge. He doesn’t know if _he_ doesn’t think he’s going insane (it certainly feels like it), but the entire thing just seems like too much of a coincidence for Bucky to be the product of his imagination. 

Steve doesn’t miss the irony of finding himself relying so heavily on some sense of the inexplicable to confirm the sight of someone around whom he explained so much of his life for so long.

Bucky used to say that Steve was lucky he had a bizarre but fortunate penchant for being rescued by women who seemed as if they could chew him up and spit him out before moving on to worthier pursuits (Peggy, mostly, but an angry Belgian farmhand on one memorable occasion and a terrifying Parisian teenager on another, and Mrs. Bertoli in the old neighborhood when they were kids, who sometimes took pity on him and chased bigger kids off with a rolling pin). Steve had laughed it off but secretly agreed, and he has never been happier to be a gentleman in distress than when he sees Maria Hill emerge from under a HYDRA helmet. 

He’s no stranger to sewers any more than he’s a stranger to death, and he certainly doesn’t mind the smell when it’s something other than the scent of impending execution. Hill cuts them out from the bottom of the truck and into the earth and the four of them emerge on the other side with Steve still trembling from uncertainty and shock but already thinking about how he’s going to get to Bucky, how soon he can make it happen.

Fury doesn’t say anything when he sees them trudge into his makeshift hospital room. The twitch near his eye says he’s kind of upset that his grand reveal has clearly been upstaged by something, even if he doesn’t know what it is. Steve can’t help if the sight of him alive is one of the more likely things he, Natasha, and Sam have seen that day. 

He can’t help it any more than he could help Bucky, apparently, than he can help him now, stuck in this cavern with Fury and the looming shadow of the tattered remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D. and three people as his only allies.

Steve can’t breathe. He stands up, chair screeching across the floor, and strides outside as fast as he can, legs eating up the distance as if he can also eat up the time between now and 1944 by dint of sheer will.

“You have got to take a breath, man,” Sam says, as he approaches Steve some indistinguishable amount of time later, a wary look in his eyes.

Steve is about to snap at him (what, he doesn’t know) but then he thinks better of it and complies, filling his lungs as far as he can, one long pull of air through his nostrils.

“More literal than I was going for, but it’ll do for a start,” Sam says.

They stand there in silence for a while, looking out at a place where a pile of trash has collected near the forest, as if one hiker dropped an empty bag of chips there by accident and dozens of others irresponsibly followed his example.

“You’ve never asked about my mark,” Sam says.

“Well, I try not to ask people questions that I don’t want them to ask me,” Steve replies.

“Good policy,” says Sam, nodding deeply as if he’s actually thinking about what Steve just said before replying. Eventually he yanks at his Stark armband until he’s worked the top half of his arm free and tilts it toward Steve.

 **Nice wings, soldier** , it says, and underneath, **And by ‘nice wings’ I mean ‘nice ass’**.

Steve can’t help it: he gives a sharp bark of laughter.

“I know,” says Sam, pulling his armband back up and smiling. “It’s kind of embarrassing. Flattering, but embarrassing.”

Steve gives him a speaking look before looking down at his own arm.

“Okay, for definitions of embarrassing other than ‘I married a HYDRA assassin who used to be my best friend and he probably doesn’t even know about it’, but you have to admit, embarrassing.”

“Yeah,” Steve concedes.

“Dude, don’t hit me with so many thoughts about this unimaginably fucked up situation all at once, I don’t know if I can keep up,” Sam says, rolling his eyes a little.

“Sorry,” says Steve. He shuffles his feet.

“What are you apologizing for, exactly? If it’s acting like you’re all alone at a 1940s-themed pity party and you can’t even get drunk because you’re the designated driver, sure. Anything else, you know how stupid that is.”

“I actually can’t get drunk,” Steve says, shrugging.

“Shit, man,” says Sam, whistling softly through his teeth. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Okay, I was going to say to you that once this was over we’d just drink ourselves to the bottom of a couple of bottles of bourbon and then talk about it when we could pretend we weren’t doing it, but I guess that’s not an option.”

Steve smiles ruefully, shrugging again.

“Listen, Steve, I don’t want to psychoanalyze you; I try not to do that unless it’s on request, and I honestly don’t think I’m qualified for your level of shit. No offense. Plus we don’t really know each other that well yet, though I like to think that relationships that start under intense circumstances _do_ work out… It’s a quote from a really shitty 1990s action movie about a terrorist and a runaway bus that’s kind of so bad it’s good,” he says, when Steve looks at him blankly. “We’ll watch it sometime, after the end of the world.”

They both look at Steve’s arm when he says that, which is why they both catch the moment when his mark goes from a sooty streak of charcoal to the bare shadow of lettering, one lightning-fast _now you see it, now you don’t_.

“What the fuck,” says Steve, surprised into saying it out loud. 

The first time he swore after they pulled him from the ice the S.H.I.E.L.D. nurse they had taking his vitals jumped like he’d just seen the Lincoln Memorial stand up and give him the finger directly, and Steve’s tried to keep it under wraps since, one more way in which he’s a shadow of himself these days. But Sam just raises his eyebrows and agrees, “What the fuck.”

It dawns on Steve a moment later, that there’s no way Bucky would be running around shooting up Washington D.C. if they didn’t have total control over him, and that the only kind of control that someone could have over Bucky Barnes that would make him hurt innocent civilians would be the kind where they made him forget who he was, the way Steve saw HYDRA—and the Allies—do to broken-down POWs in theatre.

“What the _fuck_!” he roars, furious, punching through the cement barrier in front of him, and Sam jumps. 

After a few breaths he lifts his hand slowly, broadcasting his movements, and lays his palm gently between Steve’s shoulder blades.

“You know, I always wonder what Riley’s mark would have said,” he says a few seconds later: mildly, apropos of nothing, letting his hand slide around Steve’s shoulder and away.

“Riley’s… mark?” says Steve, momentarily confused into calm. 

Sam nods.

“Yeah. You know, the whole soulmark thing happened after he was gone, so there’s no way he could have had first words for me after the fact, no way a mark could have appeared for him, but I always wonder what it would have been, if he’d still been alive or if all this had happened before he fell.”

 _No_ , Steve almost says, _I know someone who is marked with the words of a dead man: if you were meant to have another mark you would have it; it would look silvery and fine like a ripple in water_. Then he remembers that Thor’s mark is private, and realizes that to say that would sound as if he’s questioning a thing Sam is utterly certain about, something that matters to him. He stays silent.

“I can tell just by looking at your face that you’re not sure I would have a second mark if Riley were still here. But I’m telling you, Steve, that I _know_. I know in my gut, I know in the first breath I take in the morning, I know in the rush of my blood and I know in _here_ —” he thumps hard at his solar plexus with his fist “—that I would have it, that Riley would have it, that mine would be some fucking idiot thing about decimated rhino populations or how craft beer tastes like ass or whatever rant he was on that day, because he always picked up in the middle of a thought like we’d been talking the entire time we were apart and I just didn’t know it.”

“He did?” Steve says, because Bucky was like that, too, all, _And I didn’t even get to keep the fucking_ apron _after they fired me, Rogers, can you believe that?_ like he’d been telling you a story all along and you’d just missed the first half because you were looking in the wrong direction.

“Yeah,” Sam confirms. “So the way I figure it if I don’t need a mark on my arm to tell me who my brother was you don’t need black letters on yours to tell you how deep you love someone.”

“No,” says Steve, feeling the truth of it all the way down to his fingertips. “I fucking don’t.”

“You fucking don’t,” says Sam. “And whatever happens—and you know better than to expect this to go down pretty, I hope you’re not that naïve, at least: what you had was true, and it mattered, and whatever they’ve done to him doesn’t change that. But you have to promise me you’re going in with your guard up, because being brothers doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.”

Steve doesn’t know what to tackle first. The _had_ , the past tense that feels rotten and oily and totally untrue in his ears? The fact that Bucky was more than a brother, will always be something larger than life for Steve?

“I can’t promise you that,” he says, finally, picking the most manageable thing, and Sam looks at him for a long, resigned moment before answering,

“Okay. But I’m going to have your back even if you can’t,” he says. “I hope you don’t expect me to do anything else.”

“He doesn’t,” says Natasha, coming up from behind them, arm bandaged up and eyes clear like getting shot through the shoulder isn’t anything to write home about. “Right, Rogers?” she asks.

“Right,” says Steve. And then, “Thank you,” because even if he can’t thank them for their suspicion or the way they think they see Bucky more clearly than he does he can thank them for being his friends, for trying to protect him in the best way they know how.

Later, when Natasha is a thousand feet below him, probably bringing down Pierce with one arm tied behind her back, and Sam has had his wings ripped apart, Steve lets Bucky beat him to death and thinks of what Sam said. Because even if this is it, Steve gets to die with someone with whom he _belongs_. No fading mark, no change that HYDRA wrought on Bucky, alters that.

He vaguely registers that there’s something not quite right about feeling that way, that Peggy would kill him dead before she let him get away with giving up like this, but then again when he looks at his mark through his ripped uniform it is darker, darker, darker, _black_ , impossible, and Steve figures blaming the blood loss for his impaired judgment will probably be as good an excuse as any, if she ever gets a chance to ask.  
  


…

 

Steve wakes up from death again.

Sam smiles at him and doesn’t say anything, squeezing his hand once, hard. There should be more shouting, Steve thinks fuzzily. He’s happy to be proven wrong. He closes his eyes and drifts as his body knits itself back together; he can actually hear an odd, sinewy fizzing if he really listens.

Sam’s behavior is immediately explained when Steve opens his eyes again what he thinks is a day later to the feeling of fingers circling his wrist.

“What in God’s name were you _thinking_ , Steven Rogers,” says Peggy, from where her frail body is perched lightly on a wheelchair. She’s wrapped in a pale blue afghan and she looks so small that Steve physically aches with it. What were _they_ thinking, letting her out of bed like this?

She brings her elbow down hard on Steve’s privates and Steve curls up in something that genuinely approximates searing pain.

“Look at me, you Victorian consumptive heroine you, and stop thinking whatever you’re thinking. You have the kind of bollocking coming to you that I wish I could hire a more able-bodied woman to deliver, just for the pleasure of watching you squirm even more, but right now you need to _get up_ , because James has been spotted in New York and you don’t have long if you want to get there before he burrows so deep underground that you’ll never hear a whisper from him again.”

Steve looks around the room for help, trying to make some sense of what she’s telling him and perhaps hoping that someone might convince her to dislodge her elbow, but Natasha and Sam’s impassive faces and matching crossed arms say they think he has whatever it is that Peggy’s doing to him coming, and more.

“Our contact in the CIA had a hard enough time dragging that much out of the HYDRA sleeper they identified; there won’t be any more information coming. The CIA doesn’t even know whom it is they’re chasing. They’ll lose him immediately, if they haven’t already lost him. Get _up_ , Steve.”

_Her contact in the CIA?_

“I’m 93 and senile, not stupid. Someone with dementia shouldn’t have access to sensitive information of any sort. Your friend brought the news,” Peggy says as she looks toward Natasha, “But I was lucky to be lucid enough to ask for the pleasure of delivering them. If I forget I shouldn’t say anything to the nurses and accidentally let something slip later they’ll assume I’m having an episode, which is literally the only advantage of the fact that my brain is being eaten alive by itself while I watch. I thought I said get up, Captain Rogers!”

Steve gets up.

She smiles at him like a proud but livid shark. Steve forces his knees to lock so he won’t fall back down.

“I actually don’t think he’s going to disappear,” Natasha says to him five minutes later as they’re making a run for it, Steve trusting the adrenaline to help him limp along. She hands him a folder with several lines of Cyrillic stamped on the front and ushers him and Sam toward a non-descript Jeep parked outside the hospital. Steve is wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Grateful Dead American Tour 1995’ and trying to be inconspicuous, badly if her disapproving look is any indication. “The fact that he allowed someone to see him at all says to me that he wanted to be spotted, or that he’s been knocked so off-kilter by HYDRA being exposed that he’s making mistakes. One is better for us than the other, but I’m not sure which, yet. You’ve been out for three and a half days. He was in Penn Station forty minutes ago. If you get near him again, Rogers, please try to avoid lying there like a prone sheep ready for slaughter. Do me that kindness, at least; I don’t know if I can be associated with you otherwise.”

“Wait, you’re not coming with us?” Steve says, a little more plaintively than he’d like. Sam is already turning the key in the ignition.

“No,” she says, smiling more warmly than _she’d_ probably like. “We left roughly four billion tons of wreckage in the Potomac. Someone has to face the music. I don’t intend for it to be me, but I’m going to pretend that I do for as long as it’s convenient for me.”

“Convenient for you?” Steve says. That doesn’t make any sense.

“All right, for you,” she says, not really looking at him. “Get out of here, Steve. And you look out for him, Wilson. You break it, you bought it, and I’m pretty sure Carter keeps a revolver in her bedside drawer.”

She shuts the car door on Steve’s spluttering face and gives him a minuscule wave through the window before disappearing around the corner of the building.

“So, this is moving fast,” Steve says, after Sam has merged onto the highway and they’re heading north. 

Sam’s got an oldies station on that’s playing stuff Steve never lived to hear and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he drives. Maybe it’s ‘Grateful Dead’, Steve muses.

“He’s probably moving faster,” Sam replies. “We’re going to New York on a wing and a prayer right now. Literally _a_ wing; he ripped the other one straight from my pack, that fucker.”

“No, I mean,” says Steve, cautious because the anger in Sam’s voice is more akin to what he thought he’d get from them after waking up (not that he had thought he _would_ wake up, not until he had: story of his life, it seems), “I mean that the two of you were telling me all about how I had to be ready to fight him and then I clearly wasn’t—wait, do you think that the hellicariers changed my mind? Is that what this is? Because I’m not, Sam, I’m not ever going to fight him. Not if it means hurting him.”

Sam shakes his head; Steve chooses to interpret that as Sam agreeing to his terms.

“So I thought you’d put me in a locked room before helping me get to him again, I guess is what I’m saying,” he finishes.

Sam lifts one shoulder, face tightening into a frown.

“I don’t like it. Natasha doesn’t like it. Even Carter doesn’t like it, and she knew him, too. But he pulled you from the river, Steve.”

“He did?” Steve hadn’t given much thought to how he had managed to come out on the other side of death a second time, but he supposes that makes sense: there was no one else to see him fall, just as there was no one else to see Bucky fall, all those years ago. A horrible sort of symmetry.

“Mm-mmh. And look, everyone who has two brain cells to rub together knows that the way the soulmarks were sold to the masses back when they first started appearing was a whole lot of showmanship on Stark’s part and the hope that people would want to think more about what it means for us to love each other so deep that we’re marked with it than about whatever it was that marked us. But you can’t deny that there’s something true about them, something powerful. I personally have always felt like they’re an ignore-at-your-own-risk kind of thing.”

“Right,” Steve says. He supposes that’s a fair summary of how he feels, too. “So…?”

“So,” says Sam, dragging the word out. “Look at your arm, man. It’s been that way since we found you on the banks of the river.”

Steve looks at him in confusion for a second before his brain catches up to the request. Then he pulls up his sleeve, and has to look at Sam for confirmation: Sam nods. The mark is as dark as it’s ever been, an almost wet-looking streak of dark gray at the crook of his elbow.

“Oh,” says Steve. “Okay, then.”

Sam snorts at whatever he sees on Steve’s face, but doesn’t say anything else. He just drives.  
  
  
  
Three months later Steve will reflect on the absolute lunacy that was thinking they’d get Bucky within four days of dropping the hellicarriers, like he was just going to step out from behind a hot dog stand and ask them for the time.

“Oh, hey, look at me, I’m just hanging out behind this pillar waiting to fuck you up when you walk past, no problem, don’t mind me,” Sam is grousing.

Steve presses the gauze tighter against the bullet graze on Sam’s thigh before starting to wrap a bandage around it as apologetically as possible.

“I don’t think he meant to hurt you,” he says, quietly.

“Oh, I _know_ he didn’t mean to hurt me, Rogers. You know how I know? Because I have been on the end of that man’s intent to hurt, more than once. This is the palest shadow of that insanity.”

“To be fair, I think he maybe thought you were a HYDRA operative at the beginning. I mean, he never went for you after I pulled you out of that second fight.”

“Again, I’m perfectly well aware that he’s never touched me since you carried me out of there like you were intending to give me your letter jacket after school, man. This is basically like being on one of those MTV shows they had when I was a teenager, when they were just starting to turn from a channel that showed music videos to a channel that showed pregnant teenagers, and there was this kind of halfway house, shows about people dating each other from inside a van while listening to music, or whatever, and I’m the fifth wheel in one of those shows, the fifth wheel on the most horrific date ever, a date with sniper rifles and blown-apart research facilities, a date where instead of flowers the guy brings _cadavers_.”

“I really don’t think Bucky would bring cadavers—”

There’s an ominous-sounding thump outside their door. Steve looks at Sam, who looks back steadily before making a _be my guest_ gesture with his uninjured arm.

Steve picks up the shield and walks quietly to the door. When he opens it there are two bound henchman-looking types sprawled in the sand in front of the ratty beach bungalow that Steve is 93% sure Tony is paying for without knowing about it. God bless Natasha.

Sam hobbles up from the rickety bed to look around where Steve is trying to block his view of the beach outside and says,

“Oh, I’m sorry. You were saying?”

“I think they’re alive,” says Steve, prodding one with the edge of his shoe. The man moans. “So technically he hasn’t brought cadavers.”

Sam clicks his tongue at him like a disapproving grandmother before stepping around him to look down the beach, first left, then right. Steve looked the second he opened the door: it’s instinct, now. There was no glint of dark hair, no flash of metal against the sun, no prickling sense of being watched. Of course there wasn’t.

“I think the not-cadavers are for you, actually,” he says to Sam, finally. “I think maybe they’re an apology?”

Sam looks at his bandaged leg and bruised arm and at the terrified face of the man nearest the door before saying, “You know? I think you may actually be right.”

When Steve was in his mid-20s he spent an awful lot of time crawling around Western Europe on his belly in the mud, which was a more picturesque experience than people might expect. For a good old Brooklyn boy he’d seen a fair amount of the world before he died the first time. 

Chasing Bucky across the planet has made that feel like a walk through the narrow, dirty alley behind the bakery at the end of Steve’s mother’s street.

HYDRA was everywhere. Is everywhere. It’s a depressing, undeniable fact: Steve and Sam have been to the Ukraine and to South Africa and Chile and, memorable in the worst possible way, the Arctic. Places where S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t even dream of a field office, HYDRA has a presence with latest-generation technology. Steve guesses it’s not always easy to find allies in the international intelligence world, but the number of connections you can make as a criminal is endless.

They’re in Phuket now (“What I want to know is what business these HYDRA assholes had taking this delightful honeymoon getaway and putting a fucking genetic research lab on it”—Sam, Steve thinks, is getting fresher with each stamp they don’t get on their passport thanks to Natasha and Hill’s help), and Bucky, one step ahead of them as usual, has blown the facility up, left the survivors for Steve and Sam to find, and killed, or dropped on their doorstep, all the people responsible.

Steve and Sam dutifully called in the smoking pile of rubble to Hill, obfuscating heavily about who had done the blowing up in the first place, and handed over a group of tough-looking teenagers in hospital gowns to the people she sent to help. Then they went back to their disreputable beach shack to lick their wounds and wait for the next report of activity to find its way to them. This is the pattern of their lives, now, and Steve would find it funny if he didn’t feel so goddamned impotent every second of every day.

Every night, after getting as much sleep as his mind and body will allow him to have—usually no more than three or four hours—Steve lies awake in bed and listens to Sam breathe. He wonders at his good fortune to have Sam’s loyalty and Natasha’s acerbic but unwavering support; he reflects on what he’ll tell Peggy the next time they’re able to call her on the phone. He always gives himself 30 minutes per night during which he’s allowed to ask himself the really pointless, awful questions: whether Bucky remembers him, and if not, if he ever will; whether Bucky knows about soulmarks, and if he does, whether he saw Steve’s that day in D.C., and what he thought about it; whether Bucky would want to come back with Steve, whether he’s given the idea even a moment of thought, and if so, when he might decide to act on whatever decision he’s made.

“I don’t understand,” he says to Natasha one dusty afternoon in Mumbai, walking through a busy intersection and trying not to get killed while keeping his eyes peeled for a glimpse of Bucky’s familiar features. The Starkphone feels slippery with sweat in his hand. “The mark hasn’t really faded since I saw him last; shouldn’t that mean we get to find our way back to each other, now?”

It’s a childish question, he knows, but he’s having a hot, frustrating day, and sometimes throwing a tantrum can’t be helped.

Natasha _mmhs_ at him distractedly and then says, “Didn’t Thor say the darkness was about possibility? When HYDRA had him, they were in control of his entire life; in some ways the darkness of your mark was probably as much out of his control as it was out of yours. The odds of him fighting his way free after all those years were probably slim to none. Now, the possibility is there, the mark is dark because there’s nothing that means it _couldn’t_ happen, but that doesn’t mean it will. Right?”

“That’s stupid,” Steve says, stepping around a motorcycle loaded with newspapers. “What’s the use of knowing something _could_ happen?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want a guarantee of a happy ending? You and everybody else, Rogers. What makes you so special?”

She’s right, Steve knows, but that doesn’t make his and Sam’s endless trudge through increasingly unfamiliar streets any easier to tolerate. In his worst moments Steve is angry at Bucky for not remembering, for the fact that he’s able not only to evade Steve but also to do it with flair, when all Steve feels is a gnawing, desperate hunger inside, a terrible physical monster of an emotion that churns his insides up with bile and anguish.

It makes Steve feel more hopeless than any amount of ice and lost time and grief ever could. He knows he deserves it—Bucky must have been waiting, Bucky must have waited as long as it took to draw Steve out from his brain completely, and Steve _never came_ —but knowing it’s his due doesn’t miraculously expand his capacity to bear it, funnily enough. 

“I have a good feeling about this one,” Sam says a week later when they check into a small hotel in downtown Tirana, their Phuket tans out of place in the unseasonably dreary autumn bluster of the empty city.

The clerk looks at them suspiciously as he hands over their key. Whether it’s because of the deep valleys under both their eyes and the scrape across Steve’s brow or because they’re sharing a room in this disreputable hotel Steve can’t tell, and he honestly doesn’t care. He wants to drink a gallon of water and fall into bed and sleep as long as he can force himself to. Perhaps his brain will see fit to be quiet tonight.

They’re both exhausted, and Sam, who does not have the advantage of accelerated healing, has lost at least fifteen pounds. He looks more like a soldier, now, rangy and too alert. Steve knows better than to question Sam’s ability to make his own choices—they had an honest-to-god, shouting, drag-down argument about it a month ago; Steve goes out of his way to look for a fight, but never with people he likes, and confrontation leaves him feeling guilty and uncertain for days afterward. He has no intention of repeating the experience. But while he won’t devalue Sam’s agency (Sam’s words, burned into Steve’s brain after the thousand-decibel delivery) he can’t help but think that this is something he will have to answer for when the time comes, taking Sam from his peaceful life healing others into a fruitless and violent hunt for a man Steve hopes will still be someone who resembles the friend he lost 70 years ago.

“I could sleep for a week,” Sam says, lowering himself onto the scratchy sheets like he’s at The Plaza.

“Yep,” Steve says, pulling his t-shirt off by yanking at the back like a toddler. He gets partially tangled but tries to play it off like he’s just taking a moment before pulling the shirt the rest of the way off; he can feel Sam stifling a laugh, though he doesn’t make a sound.

“Do you think this is pointless?” Steve asks suddenly. The words burst out of him like gunfire.

He can’t believe he asked, though some small and frightened part of him has been thinking about it for weeks. Bucky is clearly well enough to execute highly sophisticated raids on a number of protected outposts. HYDRA is fighting like any cornered animal does when it knows that its end might be coming: with everything it’s got. As far as Steve can tell Bucky is not only coming out unharmed from these confrontations but also emerging with enough intelligence to formulate the best plan of attack for his next target. He’s acting exactly like Steve would expect Bucky to—pissed off, focused, methodical in war as he never was elsewhere in his life. Sometimes there’s footage left behind at the facilities, and Steve can even _see_ it’s Bucky, by the slope of his shoulders and the set of his eyebrows. It’s Bucky, and he clearly knows that Steve is following him, and he doesn’t want to come home.

Steve breathes out a couple of times, head still buried in the thin cotton of his shirt. He finishes pulling it off and dares a glance at Sam.

Sam is looking in Steve’s direction, but his eyes are distant like he’s picturing everything Bucky has done over the last 15 weeks, working through the information they have before delivering his assessment.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “I know what I’d want to think if it were Riley. I know what I’d want to think if it were you.”

“I don’t know if I _need_ to think that, to keep going,” Steve says.

He doesn’t mean ‘keep going with the search’; he means ‘keep going’ at all. And he knows Sam knows, from the depth of his gaze on Steve’s face.

“The first rule of coming home after combat is that you tell yourself every morning that you can absolutely keep going,” Sam says. “Even if it’s a lie, you wake up and that’s the first thing you say to yourself. With time and the right combination of things you eventually start to believe it, until one day you don’t have to say it anymore. And even then I tell people to keep doing it, so they don’t lose the habit. Because the second rule is, you never know what might make you need to start again. So you need to stay prepared.”

They look at each other across the bed, which is as small as the clerk’s narrow-eyed look had suggested.

“What if he never wants to come back to me?” Steve asks quietly.

He won’t force Bucky, not after Bucky’s spent god knows how many years being forced to do everything that Bucky before the war would have died before doing.

“I don’t know,” says Sam. “You keep chasing him, maybe. Stay with him if he won’t stay with you. Or you let him go, though it will probably kill something inside of you that won’t ever grow back.” He’s unflinching about it, honest and grave. 

Suddenly… Steve loves him in that moment, loves every part of him, from the angles of his hips to the wicked tilt of his smile to his hatred of blueberries to his warrior’s heart: he loves him to his _bones_ , and as full as his heart feels he knows there’s more space in there, because as overcome as he is in that moment, as bursting at the seams as he is, he can feel the deep cavernous space where Bucky sits also waiting inside him, a dark and beautiful place, a grenade in his chest for which someone pulled the pin while Steve wasn’t looking.

They look at each other, breath coming a little faster, and Steve knows that if he leaned over and kissed Sam right then they wouldn’t come up for air for days.

 _I love you_ , he tries to shout with his eyes, meaning Sam and Bucky and Natasha and Peggy and everyone else that makes life in this century worth living even when it feels like he’s dying every day.

Sam smiles, wide and pleased and sinful at the corners. He looks away first, shaking his shoulders quickly as he turns, like he’s shrugging off a coat. Steve folds the t-shirt in his hands and puts it on the bedside table, feeling lighter and better and almost sane.

“I told you I have a good feeling about this one, right?” Sam asks, as they put their heads down on the threadbare pillows.

“Yeah,” Steve says, smiling.

“I mean it, dude. Come on, what does your magic decoder ring say?” He jerks his chin at Steve’s mark.

Steve looks at the mark by the light of the streetlamp outside: a dark granite gray, like it’s been every day since he woke up in the hospital.

“‘Outcome looks good’,” he says, and Sam splutters.

“No, no, no, that’s a Magic-8 ball, that’s a completely different magical prediction device, man, are my lessons in the 1980s getting through at all? How can we move into advanced 21st century studies when you can’t even master the basics?”

Steve grins into the dark, and lets Sam rant him to sleep.  
  
  
  
Bucky’s waiting for him in the National Art Gallery of Albania when Steve wanders in the next morning. He and Sam had agreed that a few hours off wouldn’t hurt anyone: Bucky clearly doesn’t need their help, and “when you start asking yourself if there’s any point, that’s the time to stop and smell the roses, Steve”.

“Sam said he had a good feeling about this one,” blurts Steve nonsensically, eyes fixed on a dictatorship-era propaganda image of children painted in the Impressionist style, a small taste of artistic uprising within a totalitarian state.

Bucky smiles, a wan, exhausted thing, and says, “That guy is kind of growing on me. Don’t come any closer, Steve.”

Steve stops like they’re playing freeze tag and Bucky is in charge. He was never healthy enough to play freeze tag, but he watched enough kids do it to know. It’s a stupid memory to have in that moment, but all of a sudden he can hear the shouts of children and the clang of the loading yards and smell the dirty river water lapping at the shore further down the neighborhood.

“You can sit down,” Bucky says, gesturing at the low bench in the center of the room where people can rest and look at the artwork.

Steve sits.

Bucky’s back is to a corner of the room, and his eyes flick to the three potential exits before he orients his body slightly toward the balcony, ready to bolt in a single breath if he needs to.

Steve is very, very still.

“So,” Bucky says, casually. “How’s it going, Rogers?”

Steve tries to stop the ridiculous grin he can feel tugging at his mouth but fails, and ends up breaking into a smile that probably doesn’t look entirely sane.

“Oh, you know,” he says. “The usual.”

Bucky—Steve draws in a sharp breath—grins back, nods.

“The usual? Is that why you’re dressed like it’s 1942?”

Bucky is wearing black fitted jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt and beat-up Chuck Taylors that look dirt-colored but seem like they started out red.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I actually was buried in a slab of ice until recently.”

Something dark floats past the depths of Bucky’s eyes. Steve tenses every muscle in his abdomen, afraid to take a breath, afraid that he’s fucked it up before he got to say anything that mattered. But Bucky only looks down, smiles a little ruefully, and says,

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t fool me, pal. I read the internet; they pulled you out three years ago. Unless you’ve been living inside the basement of an abandoned Sears that whole time, there’s no excuse for this.”

“How do you know that I look like a Sears catalogue?” asks Steve, honestly curious. 

Natasha used to say that to him all the time until he bought two black leather jackets with the explicit purpose of making her stop (it didn’t work: she just laughed at him harder, but he liked the jackets so he kept them), but she had to explain the insult to him with various visual aids before he understood the point she was trying to make.

“I don’t know,” Bucky shrugs. “I know all sorts of things. I mean, it’s not like they ever let me out of the coffin long enough for me to learn about the world, but I think sometimes they needed me to look and sound like I belonged? I have a surprising amount of useless popular culture crammed in here.”

Steve forces himself past the word _coffin_ , because he has to, as Bucky taps the side of his head with one finger.

“Yeah, I don’t have that,” says Steve. “I’m a constant source of amusement for almost everyone who knows me.”

“You know a lot of people?” Bucky asks. 

He leans against the wall like he has nowhere else to be, and Steve fights the urge to break into heaving, relieved sobs, or to find handcuffs that would hold them together, or to scream, or to do anything at all except sit there very, very casually and talk to Bucky like he would if they were still perched on the fire escape outside his Ma’s house in 1937.

“I have two friends,” Steve says, taking a short shuddery breath. Bucky’s eyes sharpen at that and Steve forces the air out from his lungs more evenly on the exhale. “And Peggy. Wait, maybe three friends and Peggy. Three and a half?”

 _And you_ , Steve thinks. _And you and you and you_.

“Peggy, huh? No kiddin’,” Bucky drawls, looking genuinely pleased.

“Still the toughest lady I know,” says Steve. “Though her memory isn’t so great sometimes.” He shrugs. “What can you do.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “All of us should be so lucky.”

“Do you… remember?” Steve asks. _Do you remember me?_ , even though Bucky clearly does, but Steve wants the kind of reassurance that you can’t get from a normal conversation, the kind you can only get from overwrought confessions and the feel of a sweaty hand clasped tight with yours in the dark.

“Oh yeah,” Bucky says. “Yeah, Steve. I remember _everything_.”

Steve has so much he wants to say that he honest to god cannot decide what to shove out of his mouth first, so the two of them are forced to sit there in silence, looking at the paintings.

“Turns out it’s pretty hard to keep down a brain that insists on healing itself,” Bucky says, finally. “They had a machine, eventually, but I also had to take pills every few hours. They shot me in the neck with something twice a day, too. Burned like hell. That was at first, anyway. Then… I think I stopped trying to remember. I think I forced myself not to pay attention when my brain tried to remind me, and I only had to take the pills. But now there are no pills or shots or anything, and I remember everything. I remember now that I remembered you every time. They couldn’t keep me out of the coffin longer than three days without me going crazy. So they made me faster, more efficient. And then they invented the machine. They had a week then, maybe ten days if they pushed it. Coupla wipes in between and presto.”

The bench shatters under Steve’s hands. It doesn’t just splinter, or crack. It shatters, and Steve lands hard on his ass on the floor and holds the tears in because he knows, he _knows_ that if he starts crying Bucky will disappear. He doesn’t know how he knows; he just does.

“Shit. Want to get out of here before that single angry custodian comes upstairs to check on what the crash was?” he says, standing up and brushing the splinters from his pants.

“Sure,” Bucky says, lifting one shoulder, and he scurries out of the balcony door, not waiting to see if Steve will follow.

Steve takes one look to ensure that the lawn in front of the museum is relatively empty before jumping over the railing and landing on the grass below. He should send them some money for that bench.

He starts walking, and a few paces later Bucky weaves out from behind some bushes, careful to stay more than an arm’s length away from Steve as they walk.

Steve keeps his eyes anywhere but on Bucky: he wants to drink him in, but he doesn’t want to look like a threat. He glances at one of the concrete bunkers that still clutter the streets and sets a path down the boulevard toward the colorful pyramid building he saw on his way up to the gallery. It looked neat.

The two of them don’t speak. They used to come to these silent agreements all the time, before—they’d get into it over something or another and then they’d mutually come to the conclusion that they had better shut up before someone said something he didn’t mean, and they’d walk in silence for the next five or ten or fifty miles. Dernier or Morita or someone would fill in the silence with singing or stupid jokes, and when they were both good and ready they’d pick it up again like they hadn’t stopped.

This isn’t a fight; the silence isn’t strained or angry, but it’s heavy with so much sorrow that Steve can barely lift his shoulders with it. When they make it to the pyramid Steve perches on a cement block in the courtyard in front and waits for Bucky to assess where he wants to stand.

Bucky rests one hip against another block a few yards away and says,

“So.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, holding a hand up in front of him to make Bucky stop speaking. “I know you don’t want to hear it but I gotta say it, okay? I gotta say it once.”

He looks up, and when Bucky doesn’t make a run for it, he says, choking the words up through his closed-up throat, “I am sorry, Bucky. I am _so_ sorry. I am _so fucking sorry_. I should have—”

“Steve.”

It’s Bucky’s turn to ward him off: his shoulders are hunched and his hands are scrubbing over his face.

“I know you can’t leave it, I know you have to flog the guilt horse until it’s just bones, I know you can’t just leave a rotten thing be without fixing it before bed; it’s who you are, but I swear to you, Steve, I swear to you that I can’t do this right now.”

“I know,” Steve says. “I’m sorry; I know. I just… it’s selfish, but I had to. Just once. In case—”

 _In case I don’t see you again_ , is the awful thing that needs saying right then, but Steve won’t.

“And I love you,” he bursts out, on the heels of that thought. Bucky laughs, hoarse and strange, and closes his eyes as if he can’t believe Steve.

“I can’t believe you, pal,” he says. “I mean it, Rogers, you’re something else.”

He shakes his head, but he’s smiling, and if it’s a little sad and wrong Steve figures he has no room to comment on it. He can’t imagine the look on his face right now.

They both stand there in silence, giving each other a break. That’s the kind of friends they are. Were. 

It’s Bucky who speaks first.

“I know you won’t stop chasing me unless we talk about it first.”

“Fair warning that I’m not sure I can stop chasing you even if we do.”

“I’m so surprised,” says Bucky, lifting one shoulder. “No, really. Shocked. But Steve, seriously: I have to ask why you’re so set on this. I figured you might think the only thing that was left was a killing machine or some broken shell of a man or some other horror picture scenario only you would come up with, but I know you realized a while ago that I was fine. Well, kinda fine. Fine enough. I don’t need looking after.”

“I don’t want to look after you,” says Steve, which is a lie. “I mean, I do, more than anything, but that’s not why. I also want to look after me. No—I want to look after _us_. Bucky, I don’t want to live here anymore if you’re not here. Not now that I know you could be. I could barely handle it before and there’s honestly no way I could do it now, not knowing that there’s a possibility that we could be doing this together.”

Bucky looks blank-faced, which is either a good or a terrible sign, depending on his mood. Steve isn’t sure what mood he’s in. He used to always know.

“You could stop me from dressing like I live in the basement of Sears,” he says, smiling. Sometimes joking works with Bucky when serious doesn’t. When Bucky doesn’t crack a smile back Steve goes for the big guns, the real cannons of desperation. “Bucky, _please_. There are good things now, more than I had a year ago for sure, Peggy’s good a lot of days and there’s Natasha and Sam, and—” _my mark_ , Steve doesn’t say, but Bucky hears it anyway: he glances down at Steve’s arm and screws his mouth up like he tasted something foul.

“Do you remember? What you said to me when I saw you for the first time, the second time?” Steve says.

“Yeah. I remember,” Bucky says flatly.

“So then… Buck, if you remember, if you know, why—”

“All that stuff isn’t meant for me, Steve,” Bucky says, cool and unaffected and sure as anything, like he’s repeating his name, rank, and service number for someone.

“What do you mean that stuff isn’t meant for you?” Steve asks, nonplussed.

“You see a mark on me?” Bucky says, angry, thrusting his arms out.

“No,” Steve says, slowly. “But Bucky, everyone’s mark is on their left arm. And you—”

“Yeah, I got a hunk of metal where my arm was, but Steve, come on, you think that’s it? The way Howard’s son told it this stuff came from the gods, from the universe itself, from something bigger than you, me, everything. They showed me; I saw him. They told me I would never have something like that, and they were right. You’re telling me I’m supposed to believe all this magical mumbo-jumbo, all this power, it’s somehow held back by the fact that I’ve got no left arm? It can tell you who your soulmate is, but it can’t _switch arms_ if you’ve only got one real one to mark? This universal force, it can write on your soul but it can’t write on _metal_? If I had a wooden peg arm, would it have been able to carve into it? Is it that my weaponized arm is made of the wrong _material_?”

Bucky sounds savage by the end of it, and Steve has to admit that, put that way, it doesn’t sound so good.

He takes another deep breath. He can’t say 100% what Bucky’s feeling, not the way he would have once, nuance by nuance, but he can definitely tell Bucky’s about had it. He knows the signs of that as well as he knows his own face.

Steve’s got to find the right thing to say, or Bucky’s going to bolt. Steve doesn’t really think he wouldn’t ever come back, but that’s an if he wouldn’t risk in a million years.

He looks down at his mark. He doesn’t think it’s his imagination that it’s darker. Scratch that: it’s probably absolutely his imagination. But it doesn’t matter; it makes Steve feel just hopeful enough—not hopeful at all—to loosen his tongue. He thinks of Sam.

“I don’t know the answers to your questions, but Bucky, it doesn’t matter. I don’t know you here,” he says, stroking his arm, letting his hand fall. “I know you _here_.”

He thinks he’s going to point at his heart but when he looks down he finds his hand spread out, fingers fanned across his stomach, fingertips digging into the muscles of his belly.

“I know you here,” he repeats. “And I don’t care about the rest of it. Bucky. I know you know me here too. And when two people know each other like this, they’re not meant to be apart.”

Bucky gives him a long, searching look. Then he looks beyond Steve; he’s looking for the best direction to run in, but he hasn’t decided if he will.

Steve focuses on keeping every single muscle in his body relaxed. He lowers his arms and wriggles his fingers, feeling the cool breeze blow between them. When he thinks it’s safe he repeats,

“Bucky. Buck. Please. Please come home to me.”

He has the utterly bizarre experience of being completely shocked, and simultaneously absolutely unsurprised, to hear Bucky say, “Yeah, Steve. Okay.”  
  


…

 

Steve calls Natasha and she does exactly what he expected her to: she says, “Wait there,” and hangs up.

Within five minutes a black sedan is pulling up to the curb, a man with a pleasing but unidentifiable accent leaning out the window and asking, “Mr. Smith?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” says Bucky, when Steve stands there silently a beat longer than he should.

As soon as Steve and Bucky are settled the driver merges back into traffic. They drive for about fifteen minutes. The only sound in the car is the smooth hum of the engine and their breathing. Steve watches Bucky’s eyes: the way they rove over the back of the driver’s head, down to where the driver might keep a weapon, away from the driver and to his own door, probably to make sure it’s unlocked. That he trusted Steve enough to get in the car at all seems like a minor miracle, suddenly.

They eventually turn into a large parking garage and drive up the curling ramp to the top level, where a Quinjet is waiting in an otherwise empty expanse of asphalt. Sam is standing in front of it. 

Natasha, so effective it’s like she’s making fun of you even when she says she isn’t.

“Thank you,” Steve says to the driver as they step out of the car.

“You’re welcome, sirs,” the man replies, before driving off without another word. 

Where does Natasha even find these people, Steve thinks.

Bucky is a few steps ahead of him, so Steve jogs a tiny bit to catch up, slightly anxious about the fact that Sam’s coming toward them, too.

“Sam Wilson,” he says when they come up to him. He’s looking straight at Bucky and offering his hand.

Bucky takes it. “James Barnes. Bucky, I guess. You may remember me from programs such as, ‘Sorry I Busted Your Super-Cool Jetpack’, or, ‘Even Sorrier I Shot You, But Really, You Were Standing in a Stupid Place’.”

Steve looks between them a little apprehensively, but Sam only grins. Then his brows draw together seriously and he leans slightly toward Bucky.

“Listen,” he says. “I mean, we’ve been looking for you, obviously, and you look like you want to come home, which: great. But—I don’t know if Steve told you, or… well, why would he, or when, but anyway: I’m a counselor at one of the VA centers in D.C., man, and so despite being _so fucking glad_ that this may mark the end of us chasing your ass around what have been some pretty remarkable hellholes, I feel duty-bound to say that if he guilted you into this with the sad puppy eyes—”

“What the fuck!” says Steve, outraged, but Sam ignores him and speaks right over him,

“If he guilted you into this, which obviously wouldn’t have ever been his intention, but might have been the effect, anyway, I think I should tell you: he’s not alone. He’s pretty pathetic and honestly way more miserable than any of us would like, but he’s got friends. We’re not you. But we can take care of him if you’re not ready. We’ve _been_ taking care of him.”

“I know you have,” says Bucky, seriously. “And thank you.” Then he sticks his hand out again like it makes perfect sense for them to shake on taking care of Steve, like Steve is some helpless kid, or, or, hell knows, Steve can hardly think what—and Bucky is still speaking, so Steve tunes back in in a hurry “—grateful, I mean it. But you’re right. You’re not me.”

Then he grins irreverently at Sam and saunters onto the jet.

“Well,” Sam says, watching Bucky disappear inside before glancing sideways at Steve. Steve glares at him mulishly. Taking _care_ of him, honestly. “At least his crazy about you matches your crazy about him. Better than the alternative for sure.”

He puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder, one quick squeeze that is half _go us; I’m happy for you_ and half _thank the Virgin Mary and all the saints this is over_ , Steve thinks, and Steve forgives him for being… well, great, actually. For being great. For remembering exactly what Bucky’s come from and trying to make sure nothing they offer him is anything remotely like it.

Once they’re in the jet and buckled in, the flight is shorter than Steve expects. Flights always are, these days. Bucky sleeps—okay, he doesn’t sleep, but he closes his eyes and slouches against the side of the jet; he fakes it pretty well—and Steve tries to avoid glancing at him every few seconds. Sam’s _stop it already, dude_ looks go a long way toward helping to control the urge.

When they land, Natasha is waiting for them. She and Bucky give each other long, calculating looks on the Quinjet ramp in complete silence, like characters in a Western, before she nods, once.

“Natasha,” she says, holding out her hand.

“Bucky,” he says, shaking it.

“Rogers,” she says, bumping her shoulder companionably against Steve’s as she sidles up to him. “Welcome back, and may I offer my congratulations on not getting killed. I’ve got a couple of cars around back. Where to?”

Steve recognizes the hangar to their left because he and Sam left from it a few months ago. They’re maybe an hour from D.C., and he supposes he could take Bucky back to his apartment. S.H.I.E.L.D. patched everything up after Fury, and it’s not like Bucky ever went inside. Probably not, anyway.

The thought of dragging Bucky back to where he almost killed someone makes him feel sick to his stomach, but he can’t really think of an alternative off the top of his head. Sam would have them, of course he would, but he’s only got the one bedroom and after all the time he’s spent running around with Steve, he deserves a night of peace. Who knows if Bucky would even want to go there. They could go to a hotel or a S.H.I.E.L.D. safehouse (there have to be a few lying around still), but that will be foreign and potentially threatening—

“The tower,” he says, in a moment of hopefully not utterly misled inspiration.

“ _Stark_ Tower?” says Natasha, understandably dubious.

“Avengers Tower,” corrects Steve, though they all know that’s not ever going to be the tower’s name. “Tony said he had a room for me there. And it’s in New York. I think that’d be a good place.”

He glances at Bucky, and Bucky nods almost imperceptibly. Steve can see Natasha thinking through their alternatives and coming to the same conclusions as Steve; she nods too.

“I’m pretty sure he has a whole floor for you there, actually,” she says. “Not a room. And apart from it having, you know, Tony Stark in it a lot of the time, the tower’s actually a pretty cool place. I’ll bring the cars around. Can you help drive one of them, Bucky?”

Bucky looks up inquisitively at the sound of his name; then he looks at Sam and Steve and says, “Yep,” jogging after Natasha.

It’s Bucky’s unexpected agreement that makes the reality that he is going to have to say goodbye to Sam suddenly dawn on Steve.

“Before you start freaking out, here’s the deal,” says Sam, and Steve is about to protest the ‘freaking out’ but then finds he’s actually having to fight the urge to cry. He focuses on what Sam is saying so he doesn’t. This whole day has been too much already, and it’s only 5pm in this time zone. “I’m going back to my house to confirm it hasn’t been taken over by college squatters hoping to start a performance collective. Hopefully there’ll be hot running water, and I’ll have a long shower and then sleep for a couple of days. Then I’ll call you, and if you haven’t decided that moving in with Stark is the worst idea ever—I think it’s a good idea, by the way; good call—you tell me, and I’ll start looking for a place in New York.”

“You’ll… But what about your life here?”

Sam shrugs. “You don’t think there’re vets who need help in New York City? Plus—well, remember how I told you that I think these are an ignore-at-your-own-risk kind of thing?” he asks, gesturing toward his mark.

“…yes?”

“It says, ‘Nice wings’, right? Maybe it’s a strange metaphor, sure, but Occam’s razor says it probably just means my literal wings. I’m going to ask Natasha about fixing them up, maybe getting your friend Stark to add a few bells and whistles. You owe me; you better make sure he agrees.” He pauses. “I love working with the VA, Steve, and I’ll try to keep a hand in, you know? But I just feel like this is where I belong, at least for a while longer. In this life. On your flank.”

His lips quirk into a smile, and Steve remembers his first glimpse of Sam, a tall silhouette against the pale morning light of the Mall.

“Bucky saved my life all the time during the war,” Steve says. “He was my eyes when I was charging into things. Some of the other Commandos, too. Peggy. And I’m sure there were people feeding us intelligence who kept us out of fights we couldn’t have won. Then there’s the fact that someone had to find me in the ice, eventually, and that apparently Howard paid for the whole thing, even after he died. So I owe all sorts of people my life. But I have never in my life been as grateful to someone—”

He can’t finish the thought for fear of actually bursting into tears, which is one more thing than he can really handle tonight, if he still has to drive to New York and muscle Bucky past Tony and get them settled a few miles from where they grew up, like that’s not a huge and terrifying thing.

“You don’t have to be grateful, Steve,” says Sam. He looks misty-eyed himself, at least, which is a consolation. “You’d do the same for me.”

“Any time,” agrees Steve. “Anything you needed.”

He means it, really means it like he’s only meant a few things in his life. He’s a pretty earnest guy, but the really sacred promises like this one should be few and far between.

“Okay,” says Sam, nodding briskly. “So, see you in a few days, right?”

“Right,” says Steve, before taking two fast steps and crushing Sam into a hug. 

Sam squeezes back and Steve can actually feel it, tight around his ribs. It’s not the kind of embrace that leaves a lot of room for dignity.

“Thank you, Sam,” Steve says one more time, kissing Sam high on one cheekbone before disentangling himself.

“You’re welcome, brother,” Sam says, and then they stand there looking at each other for a long while, until Bucky and Natasha pull the cars around.

Natasha must have called Tony while Steve was talking to Sam, and she must have explained the Bucky thing—only part of it, Steve hopes—at some point, too, because when they drive into the tower’s private garage a few hours later Tony and Pepper are waiting for them by the elevator.

“Cap!” says Tony, waving enthusiastically. 

Steve can feel Bucky start next to him, and he understands. When Tony is lit up like this, animated and ridiculous with it, he honestly looks like Howard brought back from the dead. It’s not so much in his features as it is in the jerky grace of his movements, his unrestrained mannerisms, the manic pitch of his voice. For someone who claims he never spent a whole lot of time with his father, Tony sure is Howard’s son through-and-through sometimes.

“Bucky, this is Tony Stark,” says Steve, gesturing to Tony. “And his lovely partner, Virginia Potts. Tony, Ms. Potts, this is Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes. My best friend.”

“Call me Pepper, please,” says Pepper, extending her hand and smiling. “And if you can get Steve to do it, too, that would be really great.”

“I’ll try, ma’am,” Bucky says, drawing her hand up to his lips for a kiss and hamming it up like nobody’s business, and Steve hides a grin in his shoulder. Bucky looks at Tony before turning to Steve and saying, “He like Howard at all?”

Steve tries not to wince. There’s no reason why Bucky would know that Tony doesn’t like being compared to his father, and he understands why Bucky’s asking: he and Howard used to like each other more than Steve ever understood. They liked going drinking together when they could; they would chat over coffee and blueprints and weapons when others were poring over maps and arguing policy. Two practical souls in the face of too many damn idealists, they used to say. When Bucky had fallen, Howard had been quiet and grave and suddenly more interested in politics.

“Some, yeah,” Steve says, trying to apologize to Tony with his eyes. Tony is smiling, somewhat tight around the edges but mostly friendly, nodding at Bucky, and Steve appreciates him something awful in that moment. “Funnier, though I shouldn’t say that because his ego is already big enough. Smarter, I think, though I didn’t understand a lot of what Howard used to say and the addition of tiny computers to the mix hasn’t improved my comprehension, surprisingly.”

Tony is grinning.

“Kinder,” Steve says, quietly. The smile slips off Tony’s face but the warmth doesn’t. “He’s my friend, Buck. You can trust him.”

“Boy, _can_ you,” Tony says, and Steve recognizes the nerves behind the forced enthusiasm. “Bucky Barnes, who knew. It’s like a ‘Handsome Soldiers from the 1940s’ fire sale around here all of a sudden. Come on up, come on up. Wait ’til you see your floor, Cap. I’m so glad you came to your senses and came home to Papa Tony. You’re going to love it.”

Pepper is making slightly embarrassed eyes at Steve, which he takes to mean they might actually hate it. He smiles at her to reassure her that any place where Bucky can be safe will do, and wishes he could tell her just how grateful he is for their hospitality. If he didn’t want Bucky to feel like this wasn’t a big deal he would be falling all over himself right now to do it.

He just hopes the place isn’t going to be full of gadgets he can’t hope to work, that he won’t need Jarvis to help him get water out of the kitchen sink, or something.

They switch elevators on the floor with the huge living room (“the common floor, for all of us; you guys should see the gaming system I have in here, ought to make even Barton proud,” Tony says), and Tony presses an icon that’s shaped like a miniature version of the shield on the touchscreen.

“This is you!” he says brightly, as Steve rolls his eyes at him. Tony grins.

When they step out of the elevator Steve has to blink his eyes once or twice before he can make sense of what he’s looking at. He looks at Bucky, who looks as dumbfounded as Steve feels.

“…wow,” says Bucky, finally, when the silence stretches on a little past comfortable and Tony starts to look worried. “This is really amazing.”

 _Amazing_ is one word for it. It’s definitely amazing in the sense that it amazes, that it makes Steve wonder if he’s really looking at what he’s looking at. The entire floor looks like they’ve just stepped back in time to before the two of them went to war. Well, if they’d stepped back in time to some crazy mansion that neither of them would have ever been allowed to set foot in with their grubby hands and scuffed-up shoes, but the time period is right.

The elevator opens into a large parlor dominated by a glass table that looks like something Steve’s Ma would have liked, if she’d been able to afford anything like it. A beautifully preserved Phillips 274A—which Steve’s Ma actually _did_ own, the only reason he knows the model—sits on another, delicate corner table next to a heavy cut-glass vase full of lilies. The furniture, starting with the slightly damaged but probably woefully expensive Persian rug under their shoes, is period perfect. It’s like that room Steve woke up in at S.H.I.E.LD., magnified in space and opulence times a thousand.

“I thought you might be more comfortable with familiar stuff,” says Tony, peering up at Steve’s face. “And a lot of this junk was actually just sitting in my mom and dad’s house in Westchester, so I had it brought down. I mean, there’s electricity, obviously—”

“We had electricity in 1941, Tony,” says Steve, rolling his eyes.

“Ah, but not electricity like this, my friend. All the appliances in the kitchen—and everything else that turns on in any way—are wired to the rest of the house.” Tony twirls a single finger around in the air, so Steve interprets ‘the rest of the house’ to mean ‘Jarvis’. “And the radio and the TV and stuff get all the sounds of the future, obviously, but, you know, it should all feel pretty recognizable.”

Steve looks around, at the painstaking effort it must have taken to put these rooms together, and pastes a bright smile on his face. “Tony, this is great. Thank you so much.”

Tony beams, and Pepper looks relieved. She mouths _thank you_ at Steve from behind Tony’s back.

“Steve and James and Nat must be tired, Tony. Why don’t we let them get settled in? Maybe the two of you would like to come to breakfast on the common floor tomorrow morning?” she asks, directing the question to Bucky and Steve. “And you too, Nat, of course; you know you’re always welcome.”

“Yes, we’d love to,” says Steve, instinctive politeness getting the better of him. He glances at Bucky nervously as soon as he says it, but Bucky smiles. His dancing eyes say _suck-up_ , which is not untrue.

“Okay, okay, great. We’ll see you two tomorrow. You can tell me what you think of the rest of the floor then!” Tony wiggles his fingers at them in a distracted wave goodbye as Pepper pulls him toward the elevator, leaving Bucky, Steve, and Natasha alone.

“Well, boys, I’m going to be heading up to my similarly over-themed floor for the night,” says Natasha. “Enjoy yourselves and I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Is there anything you need before bed?”

She sounds solemn and sincere when she asks, nothing like the Natasha who sometimes asked Steve sarcastically if he needed tucking in when he called her in the middle of the night when Sam was asleep, and yet exactly like her.

Steve shakes his head no, but Bucky cuts in, “I don’t need it before bed—well, hopefully not—but I’m going to need a shrink.” Steve opens his mouth to say something. “ _Not_ Sam, Rogers, or any of the other three people you know. And I definitely need one. Yesterday.” He turns his attention back to Natasha. “I’m having a pretty good week this week, which is why I chose it to come talk to Steve. But I’m going to need a therapist. Someone with experience dealing with the really fucked up, who won’t end up shaken before I even get to the good parts. I’m guessing Steve doesn’t really know anyone like that, though he probably oughta. Could you help?”

Natasha nods sharply. “Sure. You got it. When I was brought over to S.H.I.E.L.D. they had to threaten to send me back before I would consent to seeing a therapist. So good job on being marginally more adjusted than I was, then. Which doesn’t take much, but I’m still impressed.”

“I’m not well adjusted,” Bucky says. “I’m just scared I’m going to murder Steve in the night.”

“That’s pretty well adjusted, in my eyes,” says Natasha. “But what do I know, I pretty much went to school at Assassination High. Anything else?”

Bucky shakes his head. “Thanks.”

Natasha says something to him in Russian, way too fast for Steve to even catch a single word for context. Bucky’s smiling when he replies. He shrugs his shoulders and then slings an arm casually over Steve. “We’ll be fine.”

“Yeah,” says Steve. He fights the urge to be defensive about it: when they were looking for Bucky, Sam would hammer the exact same point into conversation every few days. _You’re going to want to do everything for him, but you’re going to need help. Don’t be stupid about it, or you’ll fuck him up worse_. “Thanks, Nat.”

“My pleasure, Rogers. See you tomorrow.”

When she slides into the elevator Steve is forced to turn his attention back to their eerily perfect parlor. Something in him dies a little at the thought of having to step on more of the Persian rug to get to the hallway on the other end of the room.

“This,” says Bucky, picking up a bowl from the glass table, flawless porcelain in blue and white, “is fucking terrifying.”

“I know,” says Steve, gingerly working his way past the immaculately upholstered sofa. “Want to come look at the bedrooms with me?”

“Definitely not,” says Bucky. “But seeing as I don’t want to sleep here in the middle of a set for _The Philadelphia Story_ , I guess we’d better.”

They pad softly through the front room and into a hallway lit with Astoria Tiffany wall lights. At least Steve thinks that’s what they are; he thinks he painted some once from a picture at art school. 

There are three bedrooms, each looking like somewhere a Wall Street banker with anger management issues might have slept in after the Great Depression.

“Dibs on the one with the cheapest-looking bedside table,” Bucky says when they close the third door, and Steve howls in outrage.

“No way! We should at least fight for it.”

Bucky gives him a vulpine smile. “Sure, if you think you can take me.”

Steve abruptly finds he’s absolutely not ready to joke about this yet, so he says, “Okay, okay, you can have the room with the table that doesn’t belong in an art gallery. Probably, anyway. You know, sometimes those things look cheap but are worth thousands of dollars because they belonged to someone famous.” He smirks at Bucky’s dismayed face. “God, I’m starving. I’m going to go make a sandwich.”

“Steve, no,” Bucky says urgently, grasping Steve’s forearm tightly. Steve freezes, but then Bucky says, “Don’t go in the kitchen! Who knows how far Stark’s commitment to authenticity stretched? What if you go in the pantry and it’s all busted-up cans from 1943?”

Steve snorts and begins pulling Bucky along in the direction he thinks the kitchen might be.

“Steve, I mean it! What if your Ma is in there, taxidermized? What if _mine_ is? What if they kept _them_ on ice all these years, just for this?”

It’s morbid and not funny at all, but Steve can’t help it; he cackles.

“I’m pretty sure this isn’t actually the haunted house by the piers, Bucky.”

“Well, you _say_ that,” Bucky says, looking profoundly unsure.

“Jarvis,” Steve says, raising his voice. “Is my taxidermized mother in the kitchen right now?”

“I do not recall any taxidermy being involved in the refurbishment of these rooms, Captain Rogers,” Jarvis answers. “Well, except for the small stuffed partridge in the guest bathroom, I should say.”

“A stuff— Bucky?” Bucky has gone utterly still; his eyes are darting around the room anxiously, and he’s looking at Steve distrustfully. “Bucky, what is it?”

“What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“Does Stark have a surveillance system installed in the house?” Bucky says sharply.

“Oh!” says Steve. “No, he doesn’t. Well… I guess you could think of it that way, but Jarvis doesn’t really survey us when we’re in here, I don’t think. Jarvis?”

“Hello, Sergeant Barnes,” Jarvis says smoothly. Bucky looks even edgier at the sound of his name. “I am Mr. Stark’s artificial intelligence system. I am in charge of the smooth operation of any part of the tower that is linked to the mainframe, and I keep track of the inhabitants of the house only insofar as I can assist you. I do not retain any information about activity anywhere outside of Mr. Stark’s research laboratories, and I have very strict privacy guidelines designed by Ms. Potts, which I adhere to assiduously.”

Bucky does not look convinced at all.

“Buck,” says Steve. “Someone’s been watching me every minute of every day since I got out of the ice. The director of S.H.I.E.L.D. had bugs everywhere in my old apartment. To make sure they could control me as much as possible, I think. Jarvis is different. I don’t know quite how, but I have to trust someone if I don’t want to go crazy, and I don’t think Tony is going to be filming us while we’re living in his house and using the information against us. I don’t.”

Bucky nods, once, like he’s willing to go along with Steve but doesn’t like it.

“Jarvis,” says Steve. “Could you maybe—” He realizes suddenly that he doesn’t know if it’s impolite to say, ‘Turn yourself off’, like Jarvis is a television or something. “Could you… is there a way that maybe we could alert you if we needed your attention on this part of the house, but the rest of the time you could…”

“That would be simple, Captain Rogers,” Jarvis replies. “Would it be acceptable for us to use the phrase, ‘Jarvis, come online’ if you need my assistance? Otherwise I will not monitor activity in this floor of the tower at all, or remain linked to any of your electronics except the tablets in your rooms and your Starkphones. Though I _will_ have to ensure the fire, structural damage, and other sensors remain operational, and monitor those as part of their usual subroutine, of course. Would that be acceptable?”

Steve looks at Bucky, who shrugs. “If you trust Stark’s computer in the sky, I guess I trust Stark’s computer in the sky. But—just saying—you saw how they kept Zola alive, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, angry at even the memory of it. “But sometimes you just have to trust that you can tell the difference.”

“You do that, Rogers,” says Bucky, “And I’ll just watch your naïve, stupid ass like usual, I guess.”

“Going offline now, Captain Rogers.”

“Thanks, Jarvis,” Steve says. Bucky shakes his head at him like he’s crazy and swings open the door to the kitchen. Steve was right about where it was.

“Oh look, real food,” Bucky says, to the sound of the fridge opening. “But gee whiz, Steve, I don’t see a Mabel Claire cookbook anywhere. How are we supposed to know what to eat?”  
  
  
  
Steve doesn’t want to pressure Bucky into doing anything, so they spend the better part of two weeks hanging around the common space and their floor (“Once more into the mausoleum, dear friends,” Bucky says under his breath each time they get in the elevator), watching documentaries and going out for inconsequential things, like chocolate milk in a bottle and deli sandwiches made with terrible ham.

Natasha drags Steve to meet with Hill, and when Steve looks uncertainly at Bucky—who is pretending not to notice Steve’s indecision while reading a book—Natasha gives him a harsh and impatient look, and Steve goes. A couple of days later Bucky says, “I’m going out,” and Steve has to focus so hard on nodding nonchalantly that he’s sure he ends up looking like some broken animatronic. Bucky smirks at him like he knows exactly what Steve is thinking and can’t decide whether to love him for it or throttle him (but is leaning heavily towards throttling), and then he gives a jaunty wave with his gloved hand and goes.

“That guy Natasha found for me ain’t bad,” he says over dinner that night.

They’re eating a sausage stew that Bucky made, which tastes like a hearty, unspoiled version of something they once ate in a trench, Steve is sure of it. The table isn’t really set but they’re using the cream-colored china from the non-fancy cupboards, which probably still costs of a fortune but which also—for all of their complaining—actually does remind them both of home-cooked meals in their mothers’ houses.

“Oh?” he asks, dragging some bread through the sauce around the edges of his bowl.

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “He’s up near Columbia. Ancient, with tufts of hair coming out of his ears like Mr. O’Hanahan down the street, remember him? But smart as a whip, or fakes it well, and won’t put up with my shit. He was a doctor, served in Vietnam early on. Also has a PhD in psychiatry, he says. Probably more education than everyone we know put together.”

Steve cocks his head, half to show Bucky he’s listening and half to calculate whether he can lunge for the pan on the stove before Bucky can. Food keeps appearing in a box with their names on it on the common floor (and Steve is intensely grateful for Tony and Pepper’s understanding that sending someone onto their floor when they’re not there, even to clean, isn’t a good idea), but at the rate they eat they probably ought to start paying their own bills soon.

“Don’t even think about it, pal,” Bucky says, angling his chair so that he can jump out of it if he needs to block Steve’s path to the stove, and Steve grins.

“Probably not everyone we know put together,” he says, settling back into his seat and breaking off another hunk of bread before picking the conversation up again. “You haven’t met Bruce yet. And I’m pretty sure Tony had at least two degrees under his belt by the time he got pulled out of MIT to take over Howard’s business.”

“No kidding,” says Bucky. “Good for him, I guess. Well, this guy has more education than any one person needs, anyway. Which you’d think would put me off, but he’s not hoity-toity about it, doesn’t shove it in your face. He listens pretty well, says two or three smart things instead of a bunch of pointless ones. Said he thinks it would ‘beneficial’ for me to go see him every day. I don’t know if I can handle that, but I guess I’ll try. Not like I haven’t done lots of things I didn’t want to do over the last few years, right? Anyway, I told him yes but that we can’t start for a few days, because I have to go to D.C. first.”

Steve wishes Bucky would allow him to pick up on any of the heavy, thorny things he drops into conversation sometimes, but Bucky always rolls right on through to his next point, as he if hasn’t just said something awful or heart-breaking. Steve supposes it’s good that he’s saying those things at all.

“D.C.?” he says, as if that’s what he wants to ask about most.

“What, you don’t want to take me to our nation’s capital to meet the missus?” Bucky asks, something vulnerable around the crinkles of his eyes.

“You’re the missus, come on,” says Steve, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but Bucky understands: his face smooths out into a genuine grin.

“Well, whichever,” he says. “Introduce her to me, then. We gonna go?”

“Yeah,” says Steve, excited just thinking about it. “We’re going.”

Pepper finds them a car so they can drive there (“Do not ask Stark to borrow a car, Steve; I swear to God, if he pulls out a ’34 Vicky from a wooden hatch in the garage or something I will _punch him in the face_ ”), and they fight over the radio the whole way there, which is about the usual for them.

Steve keeps finding himself thinking these things—that things are about the usual, or just like they always were, or that such and such reminds him of so and so. He knows he needs to stop, because for all of Bucky’s familiarity, the ease between them when Bucky isn’t sullen and quiet, the two of them have lived through things that mean nothing will ever be ‘the usual’ again. Steve needs to respect that, or they’re both sunk. He knows that. It’s just hard to remember when he has most of what he ever wanted right in front of his face all the time.

“She might not be having such a great day,” he says quietly to Bucky when they get there. He doesn’t want him to be shocked if she’s feeling a little lost today. He knocks quietly on Peggy’s door and says, “It varies.”

Bucky shrugs expressively.

“Yeah,” says Steve, getting it immediately. “Right.”

Peggy’s face is turned toward the window and Steve slows his steps in case she’s asleep, but then she turns to look at them. Her face is distant, slack, but only for an instant: then her eyes brighten and she says, “Well, if it isn’t Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.”

“Peggy,” says Bucky, in a kind of mangled, choked-up voice, and Steve looks at him sharply.

Then he realizes: he remembers this feeling, this sense of homecoming made jagged and uncomfortable by the sharp edges of Peggy’s frailty and age. The utter delight at discovering her alive and relatively well, and the utter sorrow at the reminder of how much time has passed. How clumsy his hands felt, whole and unblemished and strong, as they stroked her long, thin fingers.

Bucky stumbles over to her bedside, and sinks heavily into the chair. He lowers his head and Steve thinks he might be weeping. He looks away so it won’t be too obvious he’s doing the same, and Bucky repeats, “Peggy.”

He never really called her that, before, and she never really called him ‘Bucky’, but she does now, sitting up slowly and holding his hands in hers.

“Well, I was hoping your return was going to finally mark the end of the Greek tragedy period of my life—he threw himself into the ocean a few weeks after you fell, you know, and I catch him trying some ridiculous honor-based self-sacrifice at least once a month, these days—but I can see you’ve just arrived to be his chorus.”

Bucky laughs wetly and lowers his head further, this time to lay a gentle kiss on her cheek, and she strokes one hand through his hair and gives him a minute to pull himself together, kind but not overly warm, the way she’s always been. Steve looks away and wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand and wills himself to stop, too.

“I know you gave me that book of plays from that little trunk of yours way back when, and told me I’d probably be bored into reading it by all the waiting we’d have to do between actually doing anything on the front, but Agent Carter, I think it’s time to admit to you that I never did.”

She laughs, and Steve smiles fondly at them both. Peggy loves literature, always did, and she was always trying to push it on others while pretending not to be focused on anything other than the war effort, the model Strategic Scientific Reserve agent. Bucky likes books, has always loved learning, but he’s spent most of his life pretending he doesn’t to anyone who asks and sometimes to people who don’t.

“But if what you mean is that it looks like I’m stuck following this asshole into every badly planned fight he ever decides to get into,” Bucky continues, “Probably until I die again, _probably_ thanks to him again, then I think you might be right.”

It’s too close to the bone, but Steve finds he likes that flayed feeling, these days, the reminder that Bucky is there to joke about things that Steve wishes he’d treat with an ounce of the seriousness they deserve.

“Do you?” she asks. 

She sounds distracted, suddenly, and when Steve looks up he can see her fading. He knows the signs by now—the slow blinking of her eyes, the lassitude that comes over her, like she forgets she can be deadly. He’s glad she got to see Bucky, at least. He’s so glad. They can come back any time.

Then she shakes her head, and Steve can see her fighting to hold on. He feels as full of awe of her now as he did the day he met her, a graceful, powerful creature that seemed entirely beyond him and yet wholly like him.

“You’re looking well, James,” she says, forcing her gaze back to Bucky’s and setting her face in a determined smile.

Bucky looks at Steve, uncertain, and Steve nods to encourage him. You have to trust her to tell you if you need to stop or slow down.

“I’m faking, it, ma’am,” he says to her. “I’m 100% faking it 100% of the time. I’m fuc— broken beyond belief inside, but I like to think I’m going to come out on the other end. The way I figure it, they had me for a year, year and a half, digging around my spine and shoulder and teaching me how to kill a man in thirteen more ways, to bring my total up to 99. Then they kept waking me up, but never for longer than four, five days at a time. I’m not even thirty, not really. They had me for just over two and a half years of those thirty, when you count it all up; they kept me drugged to the gills so I would do what they wanted. Those two and a half years are not who I am.” 

He pauses, taking a deep, angry breath that feels like it speaks for itself.

“That’s not who I’m _gonna_ be, that’s for sure. And who finally gives me a chance to find out what being me again is going to be like? This chump, who it turns out was also kept on ice for seventy years, just so he could come meet me in another century. What’re the odds? That’s a fairy tale, Peggy, is what it is. I’ve spent the last seven decades in the dark part of the forest, but it’s time for the happily ever after now, or I will be _burning this place down_ , so help me God.”

Steve wonders what it is about talking to Peggy, about her familiar features and the warm, welcoming space of her room, which makes you feel like you can blurt out anything you want, and even some of the things you don’t.

She lifts one of her thin shoulders in an almost philosophical gesture. “That’s fair, I would say. I think we can all agree you have that coming to you. You and Steve.”

Bucky looks at Steve again. “Yeah. That’s right.” He forces a smile. “Some of Steve’s friends found me a pretty good guy to talk to. Stark is putting us up in his fancy tower. I can’t believe how much he’s like Howard, and how much he isn’t.”

“Exactly,” Peggy says, letting Bucky change the subject like that’s what they were just talking about, easy as anything. “Sometimes I catch myself thinking that Howard would never be such a shameless show-off, and then I actually remember what Howard was like.”

Steve knows Peggy worked with Howard for years after he and Bucky went under. In a moment of daring he once asked her if she’d ever thought about the two of them ending up together. Steve may not have known fondue from his backside, but he did know chemistry, and the two of them had it, even though they needled each other like nothing else. “Steve,” she’d told him. “It’s enough of a struggle when two people start a relationship and they each have ghosts, don’t you think? When they have the _same_ ghosts, well—that’s one crowded, uncomfortable bed.”

“Yep,” Bucky’s saying. “He’s the same _kind_ of unbelievable his dad was, somehow. Man, I miss Howard.”

“Yes,” says Peggy, softly. “I do too.”

They sit in a comfortable, heavy silence, three survivors of a long war against time.

“Steve,” Peggy says, finally, and Steve draws closer to the bed. Bucky slides to the side of the armchair so Steve can prop himself awkwardly on the arm, and he does. He hopes it’ll hold.

“Yeah, Peggy?” he asks.

“I’ve told Robert—my son,” she adds, for Bucky’s benefit, “that I’m going to be moving to a facility in the Upper West Side later this month. He and Sarah have been wonderful, and being near Harrison’s girl Sharon here in D.C. has been a real joy, but time for Cynthia to have her mother around, I think. We’ve always driven each other crazy; might as well go out with a bang.”

“What?” says Steve, stupidly.

Bucky’s looking between the two of them and grinning something fierce.

“If you expect me to stay here and reminisce about the golden era while the two of you move to New York City and fight crime and James wears very melodramatic eye makeup, you have another think coming,” she says. “Plus, if you go that firecracker Natasha is going to go with you, I just know it, and it isn’t a book club if there’s only one of you. That’s just called reading and talking to yourself.”

“…book club?” Steve says faintly.

“I’ll be on 86th Street, almost next to the river. Near Cynthia’s place, all the better to delight that husband of hers who can barely keep up with a moderately intelligent primate. What my daughter sees in that man I’ll never know. Anyway, I expect to see you both once a week, barring alien invasions.”

“You bet, ma’am,” says Bucky, still grinning.

Steve gapes like a fish and contemplates his luck and, when prompted by a sharp jab of Bucky’s metal elbow, finally nods.  
  


…

 

A computer monster named Ultron attempts to take over the world, because that’s what happens to Steve every third Thursday of alternate months.

“You know,” Tony is saying, breath coming short over the comms, “People are always like, ‘Oh, that Tony Stark, what a self-centered asshole’, but has anyone ever actually gotten a load of Captain Virtuous over there? This is the kind of thing that happens to _him_ every third Thursday of alternate months? Who the hell just took an RPG to the—oof!— _face_ , is what I want to know? Talk about self-centered, _jeez_.”

“People,” Steve grunts, knocking four guys out with the shield, “Who _let this Ultron character loose to begin with_ may wish to keep their opinions to themselves.”

“The Captain speaks true,” says Thor, hefting a guy overhead before throwing him in the air and knocking a small battalion of people coming up the stairs down like bowling pins. “Ha!”

“Oh yeah?” Tony huffs. “Well _people_ who are from worlds that are responsible for the entire inception of this fucking mess may wish to refrain from being so judgey-judgey, just as a matter of course. That scepter didn’t appear down here all by its lonesome, you know.”

He blasts through a wall before flying through the hole and beginning to throw soldiers out as if they were sacks of flour, one after the other.

“People,” Clint pants, shooting even as he jumps from some scaffolding into the main part of the ship’s hold, “Who rely on metal suits, their godly heritage, enhanced biology, cheesy fake wings just because they have a bird code name—”

“Hey!” says Sam.

“—or otherwise are operating with an advantage that us mere mortals do not have may wish to remember that their feats of strength are not as impressive as they think, so using them as backup in their attempts to win a childish argument is crass.”

He shoots six men in quick succession.

“People who have been socialized to think that dick-measuring is acceptable even in life-threatening situations due to the privilege of their gender should zip it before I go get that Maximoff girl and we _fuck your shit up on principle_ ,” says Natasha, cool as a cucumber and all the more terrifying for it.

“RWAAAARGH!” says Bruce.  
  
  
  
The Maximoff girl is perfectly willing to ‘fuck their shit up’ without Natasha’s help, it turns out. She is—mostly—unsuccessful, though none of them are proud of their oversight in the aftermath.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought the great and powerful Thor was above all this,” says Tony, hovering over Thor as he sits on the steps, shaking his head dazedly. “‘I do not blame you for falling prey to the witch’s tricks, Tony Stark’, he says to me. ‘Her powers are too much for a mortal to withstand’. Well, your ‘withstanding’ doesn’t look so hot to me, bud.”

“You’re all mental weaklings,” says Clint, picking dirt out from under his fingernails with an arrowhead and smirking.

“Will you _be quiet_ ,” Thor rumbles. “I am trying to _concentrate_.”

“Just look down at your arm, man,” Tony says. “No mark, no dice. Lucky I lifted my arm to take the scepter out of its fancy holder the last time, I guess. Snapped me right out of it. Works like a charm; try it.”

The Maximoff boy is bound up in Stark-design elastic cuffs, hands and feet. He’s lying mostly prone on the floor looking sullenly at Thor, and Steve is patrolling the scaffolding above for his sister. Sam’s doing the same on the opposite end of the warehouse.

‘Ultron’ has disappeared, clearly not the kind of evil computer monster willing to fight at a disadvantage. _Well, with a name like Ultron_ , thinks Steve, huffing an incredulous breath out through his nose as he walks. Fucking Tony.

Only the flash of hope in the boy’s eyes gives his sister’s presence away; Steve spins to grab her, but she’s too fast, placing cool fingers on his forehead before he can pin her wrists.

“Oh for the love of God,” says Steve, looking around. “What is it with you people and the forties. They weren’t even that great! We were shooting each other in the mud for half of it!”

He knows there’s something he’s supposed to do, but suddenly he’s distracted by the sight of all the people in the bustling ballroom, the fizz of champagne pouring over a coupe tower, the sound of familiar voices just around the corner. He thinks he knows someone here, maybe, and he maneuvers his way through the dance floor to try to find them.

“Champagne, sir?” asks a non-descript man in a white jacket, and Steve accepts, lifting his arm for the glass—his _arm_.

Steve tears at his jacket. He can hear people tittering around him, wondering at his inappropriate behavior, but he doesn’t care: he drops the jacket and pulls at the cuff of his shirt and the cufflink comes loose with a soft _clink_ on the hardwood floor. He pushes the sleeve up, baring pale skin to his elbow and then… more pale skin, unmarked, his arm utterly unadorned all the way to his shoulder.

There’s something wrong with it—it’s supposed to be metal, he thinks fuzzily, and then, _no, that’s not right_. But it _is_ supposed to be different. 

Bucky’s mark isn’t there, he realizes, like Jane’s isn’t, like Pepper’s wasn’t, and Steve remembers in one flash of bright light, the warehouse swimming back into focus and Sam’s voice in his ear.

“Steve? Steve!”

“Will somebody get this _fucking kid_ already,” Natasha says, sounding hazy herself, and Clint stands up from his crouch and says, “On it, Nat.”

She’s not fast like her brother, and is clearly unwilling to leave him behind, and with all of them somewhat clear-headed they make relatively quick work of grabbing her. Natasha looks shaken when they all gather; Steve picks his way over to her across the twins and leans down close.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” she says.

 _Really_? he tries to ask her silently, peering more closely at her.

She flicks her eyes at him, and Steve immediately sees the sincerity under the put-upon exasperation. _Really_.

“Uh… guys?” They all turn to look at Tony, who is standing guard over the Maximoffs and looking around. “Is Bruce still squashing the Iron Legion—those fucking robot _traitors_ , you’d think they’d know their designer from some _fucking AI megalomaniac_ — outside with his giant bare hands?”

There’s an ominous silence as they all look around for him, and a deeper, calm-before-the-storm quiet when they all realize they can’t hear him outside.

Tony flips up the faceplate of the suit and says, “Does Bruce still have his mark when he’s, you know, not-Bruce?”

“No,” Natasha says, straightening up fast. “He doesn’t—or maybe he does, but he thinks the rage obscures whatever possibility there is for the mark, makes it too light to see.”

The Maximoff girl smiles.

“Go,” says Natasha.

“Yep,” says Tony, and blasts off.  
  
  
  
Somehow the capture of two enhanced teenagers isn’t enough to cool the world’s rage over the destruction of a pretty big chunk of Johannesburg, so they hand the Maximoffs off to Hill for her to deal with and fly to— 

“Clint’s secret down-home farmstead in Virginia, apparently?” says Tony.

“What the hell,” says Sam, unbuckling his pack and setting it gingerly by the door as two children run toward Clint.

“Dad!” says the boy.

“Aunt Nat!” says the girl.

“What the hell,” Steve repeats, and Sam widens his eyes at him comically and shrugs.

“Hi honey,” Clint is saying, slowly stripping the deadlier parts of his uniform off, dropping the arrow-laced vambraces on the hall table. “I’m home.”

A lovely woman comes through the archway leading to the dining room, and Steve watches Natasha watch Clint as he turns to greet the woman who appears to be his wife, wrapping an arm around her waist and kissing her gently. Natasha smiles. Clint and his wife kiss like two people who are still in love, and Steve smiles helplessly, too. He’s always been a soft touch for that kind of thing.

Steve’s never paid a huge amount of attention to Clint’s mark—it’s politer to pretend you’ve never seen a mark unless someone wants to talk about it, is Steve’s philosophy—but he wonders now if this is the woman who gave Clint his **Of course you would mark me with something as trashy as you are, Barton**. She doesn’t quite seem the type, but Steve supposes you never know.

“Everyone,” says Clint. “This is my wife, Laura. My kids, Cooper and Lila.”

Natasha bends down to place her hand gently on the woman’s pregnant belly. “And their soon-to-be-sister—”

Laura winces.

“What?” asks Natasha.

“Brother,” Laura says, and Natasha laughs, delighted in her outrage, before crouching down completely to speak to Laura’s stomach. “Deserter!”

“Ha! Told you,” says Clint, squatting to place his hand next to Natasha’s, and as he lifts his arm beside hers suddenly Steve knows. 

Natasha’s mark belongs to Clint, who didn’t need no goddamned tattoo to tell him she was family.

Natasha catches him looking and dips her head, silently confirming Steve’s guess, and Steve grins at her. He’s happy for her, to have more than one person who loves her this deep, and he’s happy for Clint, who can claim as amazing a woman as Nat as an aunt for his kids, particularly because the rest of his family is gone. Steve wonders what Laura’s mark says, and to whom it belongs; one day, if he’s feeling brave and impertinent, he may ask Natasha.

“As enchanting as this family reunion is,” Tony says, “And for once, let me clarify that I’m not being sarcastic: this really is beautiful. You done well, Barton. But that dick Ultron’s still out there, and I, for one, would rather sleep in my own bed tonight, enamored as I am of this rural paradise. I mean, are those gingham curtains, or do my eyes deceive me?”

“They don’t,” says Laura. “I sewed them myself. And yes, that’s apple pie you smell baking in the oven. But you’re all going to have to wash up before dinner, and Anthony, we’ll assess if you can have a piece then.” She wags her finger at him.

Tony’s eyes gleam like they do when he’s well and truly charmed, and he says, “You know what, on second thought, Bruce and my Frankenstein’s monster can wait. I mean, it’s not like we can really leave before having a slice of pie, am I right?”  
  
  
  
They find Ultron in Seoul, trying to build himself some kind of organic body (“All the better to dominate your world with, my dear,” says Sam, jabbing furiously at the big red button on the casket. “I assume this means ‘stop building meat suit’; let’s hope it’s not ‘turbo charge’, or we’re fucked.”)

Bruce and Tony are doing something that looks very essential for the protection of the world over a number of screens, and Thor is gingerly picking up Loki’s scepter, looking half-curious and half-repulsed as he walks it over to Tony’s friend Dr. Cho and taps her gently on the chest.

“I think I should take this back to Asgard,” he says, as one of Dr. Cho’s assistants rushes forward to help her, “For my father to decide how we can best protect the stone inside.”

“Holy shit, that’s right, there’s an ‘Infinity Stone’ in there, right?” asks Tony, excitedly, momentarily distracted from the screens. Bruce keeps his head down and his eye on the prize, Steve is grateful to note, though knowing Tony he finished before he looked up. “Man, can we get like, cool body mod fate-markings out of this one? ‘Should I pursue my dream of being a sheep farmer and crochet craftsman instead of running a massive international conglomerate and occasionally saving the world’? Pierce left nipple for yes, Prince Albert for no.”

“I do not know what that means, but the Lady Virginia told me once to just assume the answer is ‘No, Tony,’ because that path is usually safest to tread, and so, no, Tony,” says Thor.

“Aww, come on,” says Tony, scuffing his foot on the floor. Then he actually looks up at Thor, glances around at everyone else carefully, and says, “No, but seriously, we don’t want to finish looking into that thing? Not even a teensy-weensy bit?”

There’s a stony silence when everyone in the room stops to glare at Tony. He looks at Bruce for support, but since Johannesburg Bruce has looked like a man who would rather look inward than outward, and he only shakes his head slowly, not meeting Tony’s eyes.

“Okay, no, you’re right, obviously,” Tony says, lifting his hands up in surrender. “Thunder away, man.”

“I will return soon,” says Thor. “In the meantime, do not let your hearts be troubled by what the young witch showed you. Bruce Banner, you should not torture yourself over what you could not control. To be used as someone else’s tool is an abuse upon the self, not a crime one must answer for.”

Sam looks up at Steve, raising his eyebrows, and Steve nods to show he heard it, too. He’s made a habit of picking up wisdom wherever it will come to him, because god knows he doesn’t have anywhere near enough to know what to say on his own, most of the time.

Thor inclines his head at them, clasping Bruce briefly on the shoulder, and strides from the room. A familiar _crack_ outside marks his departure.

“I mean, I’m just saying, there’s a lot to be gained, scientifically speaking, from looking at those things more closely,” Tony mumbles. Steve thinks it’s partly an attempt to distract Bruce; Tony is gracelessly kind that way. “We don’t have to try the world-defense system again if you guys don’t want to.”

“Sometimes,” says Natasha, “And by ‘sometimes’ I mean ‘most of the time’, I regret not killing you when I had the chance.”  
  
  
  
Steve doesn’t think of Bucky while they’re chasing after Ultron, because he can’t. He’s never thought of fighting as something that he couldn’t do with half his mind on something else: during the war, and particularly after, before Bucky, Steve would take down people for S.H.I.E.L.D. while thinking about something Peggy had said, about the future, about what he wanted for dinner that night. It turns out that the depth of the ‘something else’ can have more of an impact than you’d think, though. To even let Bucky cross his mind is to want too many conflicting things, to go somewhere other than where he needs to be.

He wants Bucky by his side, shoulder to shoulder. He wants Bucky never to have to fight again, not even for the last strawberry yogurt at the supermarket, not if he doesn’t want to. He wants to put down the shield and walk away so he can have both.

“Are you _actually_ thinking about staying here to babysit me right now?” Bucky had said, wrenching the head off an Iron Legion bot at Tony’s party and tossing it over his shoulder. “I mean, honestly. That’s a thought that you’re having. ‘I’ll stay here and watch Bucky scramble some eggs and run a few errands, wait for him to come home from Morningside Heights while I finish my knitting, that’s what really needs doing right now’.”

“N—no,” says Steve, mostly because he knows it’s the right thing to say, not because it’s what he’s actually thinking.

“You know, it’s not so much the lying as it is how badly you do it, like I haven’t known you since you crapped your pants at the fairground once and wouldn’t admit it.”

“I did _not_ crap my pants at the—you know what, I refuse to continue having an argument that started in 1926. I fucking refuse, Bucky.”

“Guess you better go with those guys, then,” says Bucky, jerking his chin toward where the rest of the Avengers are assembling. “’Cause if you stay, you better believe we’re going to be having this argument. The whole time. You know, if I concentrate hard enough I think I can still remember the smell of the peanuts that started the whole pant-shitting incident. A kind of opposite-of-new-car scent, if I recall correctly. Stay, Steve, let’s reminisce.”

“Oh, screw you,” says Steve, snapping the shield into place on his back. “Fine.”

Bucky grins at him, but there’s something sharp around the edges of it: it’s a dangerous smile, and it says, _stop it or else_.

Steve flushes slightly, chastised, and says, “See you when I get back, I guess. Look out for yourself.”

“I’ll make sure not to get mugged in mean, gentrified Manhattan while you’re out slaying dragons,” Bucky replies, rolling his eyes.

“Bucky, you know I—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’d leave the shield behind for me, we all know; you also wish I could go with you, and in that we’re in total agreement, pal. But I’m too fucked in the head to fight and you’re too fucked in the head to stop right now, so let’s both do what we’re supposed to and I’ll see you when you get back.” He raises his voice. “Hey, Wilson! Go with this asshole, wouldya?”

“I was planning on it, yeah,” says Sam, appearing next to Steve.

“Great. And just so you know: you break it, you bought it,” says Bucky, with the same dark grin from before.

“Better women than you have made that threat, man,” says Sam, and pulls Steve after him, as if he realizes Steve won’t be able to go without help.

They’re halfway home in the Quinjet, now, Sam dozing (“Not sleeping, just resting my eyes; we can’t all be the Energizer bunny”) beside him, and Steve is poking at his mark with one finger, watching the color bleed out of the skin that surrounds it with the pressure and come back when he lets go.

“If you ask me again if I think it’s slightly lighter than it was before we left, Steve, I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

“I haven’t asked you that at all!” says Steve, outraged mostly because he’s thought about it.

“Oh, but you’ve thought about it,” says Natasha, dropping into the seat across from theirs.

Steve averts his eyes and doesn’t answer. Does he spend a little more time than he should examining the mark? Yes, if he’s honest. He doesn’t know what it is. It’s not that he puts stock in it, not really; he wasn’t lying to Bucky when he told him the mark is the last place that Steve looks for him, because Bucky is grafted into the skeleton of who Steve is in a way that makes the mark feel inconsequential. But there’s something reassuring about it all the same, about the dark gray constant of it: a small beacon pinging Bucky’s presence, his continued existence, onto Steve’s skin.

“Maybe I should text him,” says Steve, finally. 

The fighting is done; he can spend a few minutes composing a text that doesn’t feel overbearing, now. He’ll even forego signing it, ‘Your pal, Steve Rogers’, because Natasha told him signing texts, ‘Your pal, Steve Rogers’ is lame.

“Oh my god, maybe you should,” says Natasha, leaning forward excitedly.

“Wha—?” Steve asks, just as Sam cuts in,

“Maybe you better send him a picture, though, Steve, just so he can see you’re doing okay. Hashtag survived, hashtag miss you. ”

“I—”

“Do you think he’ll get that Steve is saying he like-likes him, though?” Natasha asks, and Steve realizes they’re making fun of him a second before they burst out laughing.

“Oh, fuck you both.”

“Ooooh, moody,” Natasha says. “It fits our teenage sleepover party theme!”

“You know, you don’t know what it’s like,” he says, finally, because he gets what they’re saying—he’s probably overwhelming Bucky; he worries too much: he feels anxious about not speaking to Bucky and also anxious about speaking to him, these days, and it leaves him almost paralytically indecisive—but he’s not entirely without reason for it, and he doesn’t know how else to make sure Bucky knows he’s _there_. That’s the only thing he wants.

“Actually, I do,” says Sam, perfectly serious all of a sudden. “I have friends still serving, people for whom I wish I could do more, people I wish I could speak to every day. And I’ve lost people, people I tried to help, men and women who slipped through the cracks and now I don’t know where they are, if they’ve even managed to survive out there. If someone hurt them after I lost track of them. They’re not my BFF from a hundred years ago, sure, but that feeling of wanting to help—it gets deeper the more you love someone, Steve, but the helpless patience that it takes to watch someone struggle his or her way to the surface without weighing them down with your attempts to help, usually when you’re struggling yourself? That’s the same, I promise you that.”

Steve is ashamed of how often he forgets that Sam is trained for this, that he’s not just a steady presence watching Steve’s flank but someone that Steve can learn from in all sorts of ways.

“I don’t know what to do,” says Steve. “Most of the time it feels like it’s the same as always, but I know it’s not. I know. And I want to fix it and it can’t be fixed with any of the things I know. It’s not a bully you can beat up, or get beat up by. It’s this formless, awful, paint-smeared-so-thick-you-can’t-see-canvas mess of a thing, and it’s him. It’s _us_.”

“Yeah,” says Natasha, gently. “Life is messy, Steve. People are even messier.”

It’s a complete platitude but also a profound and uncomfortable truth, and Steve tries to sit with it. He physically sits there in silence for a few minutes, struggling with the kind of anxiety and uncertainty that he’s never really felt before now, choking down his frustration and his heartache. He’s lived thirty-one years off the back of one friend and one over-simplified idea of what it meant to do what was right, and the growing pangs of maturing past that hurt like hell, it turns out.

“Okay,” he says, finally. “Come here.”

He puts his phone out in front of him, and Sam and Natasha get what he wants almost immediately: they crowd into the frame, making ridiculous faces. Steve takes the picture and sends it, adding some text below. _HASHTAG survived, HASHTAG miss you_ , he types. Sam looks over his shoulder and laughs, and Natasha pats his shoulder.

“This is why I like you, Rogers,” she says. “You grumble and you grumble about it, but you’re not afraid to try new things.”  
  
  
  
As the Quinjet approaches the new landing bay on top of the tower, Steve looks out the window and sees Bucky waiting by the X that marks the landing zone. His hands are in his pockets, but he’s wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt: his arm gleams in the sunlight.

“He’s going to let me fix that rustbucket, right? Please, Cap, you have to convince him.”

Steve happens to know that Tony is impressed by the sophistication of the arm, and mostly curious about whether he might be able to improve it, rather than sure he could. He smiles.

“Ask him yourself, Tony,” he says, lifting his hand to the window in a wave and feeling immediately stupid about it. He feels slightly less like a goof when Bucky lifts his hand in return. “I’m not the boss of him.”

“Well, no, he’s clearly the boss, Rogers, but it’s not like I’m not ever able to convince Pepper of things. You just have to use the right combination of soft influence and… elbow grease, if you know what I mean.”

“I actually don’t know what you mean,” Natasha cuts in as they disembark. “Is that a lube joke, or a metal arm pun? You didn’t really land that delivery.”

“Why can’t it be both?” asks Bucky, wiggling his fingers, and Steve shakes his head at him and rolls his eyes fondly. “Hey, hashtag,” Bucky says, turning to him and grinning, and Steve immediately knows he did something wrong with that text and will probably never live it down.

“Hey yourself,” he replies. He’s happy to let Bucky drop that humiliation hammer when he’s good and ready for it. 

There’s a moment of silence as they both try to pretend they’re not checking the other over for scrapes and dings on the way down to the common floor.

“So, I got a job,” Bucky says quietly to Steve, as Tony is asking someone on the phone to bring “Food, any food, lots of it, and be snappy about it. Please, I mean.”

Steve doesn’t know how Natasha hears, but she does. “Baby’s first job! Well, kind of. Please tell me it’s something charmingly old-fashioned like carpenter’s apprentice or ‘man down at the docks’.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says, shrugging. “It’s at an artisanal coffee lounge.”

“What the hell is an artisanal coffee lounge,” Natasha says, flatly.

“Wait, wait, are you telling me you’re going to be a sullen but alluring barista somewhere?” Tony says, sitting down on the arm of the couch next to where they’re standing and stuffing pretzels that he found god knows where into his mouth. “And Pepper said reading those gay romance novels was a waste of my time. Oh, how wrong she was. Do you have a collection of diaphanous v-necked t-shirts yet?” he asks Bucky.

“No, I was waiting for you to come back so you could offer your invaluable fashion advice first, Tony,” Bucky says, with that too-earnest deadpan that he does, and Steve watches Tony flounder for a second before he catches sight of Steve’s face, and says,

“You’re fucking with me.”

“You think?” Bucky asks.

“Anyway,” says Steve, before it devolves further. “A coffee shop.”

“An _artisanal coffee lounge_ , Steve. With a commitment to single-origin coffees, flawless slow-pour brewing methods, and a carefully curated green-bean roasting process that seeks to emphasize indigenous flavors,” says Bucky, like he spent the days they were away memorizing a brochure just so he could do this.

Steve peers at him, trying to decide if he’s at it again. “Wait, I actually can’t tell—are you still messing with Tony?”

“Nope,” says Bucky, inscrutable. “It’s in Williamsburg. My boss has a moustache that looks like Otto von Bismarck’s. Somehow I don’t think he’s serious about it. He thought my single glove was ‘rad’. The place is called flatwhite. All one word, no capitals. When they hired me they gave me a quinoa-flour scone on the house. I think it was their attempt to sweeten the deal.”

“Are you kidding me?” asks Sam, getting in on the collective disbelief. He peers at Bucky’s face. “You’re not.” He shakes his head. “White hipsters, I fucking swear.”  
  


…

 

 

Steve has never understood what Tony does with his computers; at times he’ll even admit to some confusion regarding what Clint and Natasha are doing with some of Clint’s fancier, high-end scopes. But whatever Bucky does in that coffee place of his is actually entirely fucking beyond Steve, in a way that makes him feel more than ancient, past fossilized, in through extinct and out the other end.

“I’m very rarely going to be able to say this to you,” says Sam, “So savor it, man: it’s not your age. I’m pretty sure whatever they’re doing in there is alchemy. Pretentious, pointless alchemy.”

“Sweet, delicious alchemy, I think you mean,” Tony interjects. He has a brown cardboard cup with flatwhite stamped carelessly on the side, off-center and smudged as if to say _we protest this branding exercise_. Steve feels fairly certain Tony sent someone to Bucky’s store to get it just so he could shuffle in on Steve and Sam’s conversation at an appropriate moment. Maybe the cup is empty; Steve wouldn’t put it past Tony. “Science at its best, you heathens. Rogers, don’t listen to him—this just happens to be an instance in which you’re not alone in needing to get with the times. The fact that someone else is wrong with you doesn’t mean you’re right.”

He looks suddenly surprised, like that’s something someone’s said to him before and now he’s shocked that it just came out of his own mouth. Steve and Sam grin at each other but otherwise ignore Tony by silent agreement, so he slurps his coffee as obnoxiously as he can as he walks away, waving the cup at them before he gets in the elevator. 

(Assuming it _is_ coffee and not air, or some substance that Bucky transmogrified into something that could also be used to power the suit. ‘Fondue’ has nothing on some of the shit that comes out of Bucky’s mouth these days.)

Steve watches Tony go and wishes he could say to Sam that it’s not just the coffee that confuses him, but also whatever Bucky’s after in making it, but even he can tell his curiosity is not a casual, friendly interest, but an uncertain, needy thing. It doesn’t seem like something that would help Bucky, so he keeps it to himself. 

He thinks Sam knows, but he only watches Steve with dark, knowing eyes and doesn’t force him to talk about it.

Bucky always comes home smelling smoky and a little sour, like the beans that they roast in the back of the coffee shop. He works either the morning or the afternoon shift each day and keeps his appointments with O’Hanahan—the man has a real name, but neither Steve nor Bucky ever use it, so he might as well be called O’Hanahan—and learns how to steam milk (“Microfoam,” says Bucky. “Not a real thing, Barnes,” says Sam) using a tiny metal straw that shoots steam out of the end.

After a few weeks he’s also allowed to use a machine that looks like something from a witch’s cottage in a kid’s story, a glass bubble suspended over a tiny metal cauldron that he has to use a bamboo stick to stir. Bucky takes a picture of it and shows it to Steve, who shows it to Natasha and Sam when they’re on a job (“Okay, it’s official, he works in an alchemy factory,” says Sam. “It’s a coffee shop,” says Steve, wearily. “Artisanal coffee lounge!” says Natasha, kicking a man in the face).

“That thing costs like twenty thousand dollars, Steve,” Bucky says, when he walks in the door a couple of hours after Steve gets back from rounding up rogue HYDRA weapons manufacturers with Sam and Nat.

“The milk-steam straw thing?” asks Steve, horrified.

“No, I mean, the glass ball contraption. And also the other espresso machine we have. They cost twenty thousand dollars. Each.”

“That’s,” says Steve, mollified for about half a second by the thought that the milk-straw thing couldn’t be used to buy two cars, then shocked again, “That’s not really any better.”

“No,” says Bucky. “It really ain’t.”

Steve gets the feeling Bucky is as confused as the rest of them, but game: it’s a perfect echo of Bucky during the war, his ‘we’ll see’ approach, the perfect balance for Steve’s more black-and-white tactics.

Bucky strips off his glove, a thin synthetic that Tony designed for him, and drops it on the table. He lifts his hands above his head as he walks toward his room to change, and Steve watches him interlace his fingers, metal against skin, as he stretches upward. He follows the line of Bucky’s forearms down to the breadth of his shoulders before looking away.

“You’ll never believe what I noticed today,” Bucky says a few minutes later, walking into the kitchen where Steve is cooking. He looks bemused. “I mean, after I considered the price of the coffee machines and the coming apocalypse in silence for half my shift. You know Francesca?”

“The one with the—” Steve gestures vaguely toward his torso; Bucky has told him before that one of the girls he works with only wears clothes she makes herself. Steve’s Ma used to do that, sometimes, sew shirts for Steve or dresses for herself, but Bucky showed him a picture and the girl’s sweaters don’t look anything like that.

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “A few days ago I was making some asshole’s drink and he had his eyes fixed on my glove the entire time, right?” He wiggles his metal fingers.

“Right,” says Steve, trying not to sound angry about it. The amused look on Bucky’s face says he did not succeed in any way.

“Anyway,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes. “This guy is looking, and Francesca steps between us, all five foot nothing of her, and says, ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’, polite as anything but with this real undertone of ‘fuck you sideways’, you know? And I didn’t think that much about it—they’ve been pretty great about it.”

Steve nods. Bucky’s co-workers think he keeps an experimental prosthetic given to him by the army under his glove, which is close enough to a happy version of what could have been that Bucky is comfortable with it. Bucky told them he only recently got back to the States from being deployed and is still self-conscious about his arm; he wears long sleeves and the glove, and asked to mostly work behind the counter when they hired him. They agreed straight away.

“But then today, some harried mother comes in with one of those baby carriages they have these days, the ones that look like the kid is about to be launched into space?”

Steve nods again. They’ve discussed their shared confusion over these contraptions before.

“And her eyes are fixed on me, and then on the glove, and Rodrigo puts both hands on the counter by the cash register and leans right into her and asks her if she wants something else, in a voice that would have had my Ma boxing me around the ears, that’s for sure. The woman couldn’t get her baby moon machine out of the shop fast enough.”

Bucky laughs and Steve smiles, kind of unsure whether the story is over or not.

“I think they’re trying to be _protective_ ,” Bucky says, looking at Steve with wide eyes. “Can you imagine? Civilians, probably couldn’t lift one of those oak tables we have in the corner of the store even if they were working together, and they’re…” he trails off, shrugging incredulously. “They’re like _ducklings_. Angry, defensive ducklings.”

Bucky’s face is slightly flushed with mirth and he’s smiling and beautiful and he looks exactly like the kind of man who would collect the coffee-making equivalent of ducklings, but Steve doesn’t say that to him. Steve loves him something crazy in that moment, but he doesn’t say that either. He just laughs with Bucky and says, “If they only knew what a jerk you were,” trying to keep the smile on Bucky’s face.

It works. Steve watches Bucky huff a laugh and turns away to take a couple of bowls off the shelf, feeling fiercely content.

Bucky always has at least one story to tell about what he got up to during the day while he and Steve were apart. He tells them to Steve over dinners and breakfasts in the quiet of their floor, and sometimes he has pictures to go with them; the pictures always look better than anything Steve takes on _his_ phone.

Bucky used to tell only good stories, but little by little he’s also begun to say out loud that things frustrate or scare him. Steve isn’t sure why HYDRA kept feeding Bucky information about the world the way they did, but the result is that Bucky is very rarely confused or lost the way Steve was when they first woke him up. But he gets angry, fast (mostly at himself), when he doesn’t know what to do with what he feels, usually when he’s faced with something that makes him feel vulnerable. That he’s able to find the humor in his coworkers doing something unexpected fills Steve’s chest with a sweet satisfaction. Bucky is building a life, Steve thinks, and every time Steve catches a glimpse of it he’s proud, and sad that this is something that Bucky’s having to work so hard at, and also intensely happy that he’s succeeding at it.

In the meantime Steve has gone back to working with Natasha and Clint—sometimes on things Fury or Hill find for them, sometimes just cleaning up a neighborhood for fun. Now that Sam is in New York he comes along, too. Steve has to admit that Bucky having a job is a big part of Steve going back to something like a job of his own; he wouldn’t have felt comfortable leaving Bucky alone for such long stretches of time, and he suspects that’s partly why Bucky works in the alchemy factory. The coffee shop. Steve sometimes feels guilty: he’s supposed to be taking care of Bucky, not the other way around, but he knows Sam would tell him that no one is supposed to be taking care of anyone, so he tries not to worry at the thought like a loose tooth, the way he wants to.

When he’s not working and Bucky is Steve spends much more time than he’d like to admit at a diner on 23rd Street that has good wi-fi, browsing Wikipedia and trying to look inconspicuous about Googling things like ‘trickle-down economics’ (ridiculous; anyone who has ever been anything near poor could have told them that, if they’d bothered to ask), ‘rising tides’ (Steve’s never been more grateful for Tony and the arc reactor), or ‘Like a Virgin’ (not what it sounded like, it turns out). 

He doesn’t tell Bucky about the endless milkshakes and root beer floats and ‘green power smoothies’ he drinks while he’s there, about how he sometimes feels awed and overwhelmed or really blue. He figures Bucky is entitled to the same privacy: Steve knows he has the coffee shop and O’Hanahan, but he only knows what else Bucky does with the long hours of his days through the stories Bucky chooses to tell him. Steve is grateful for what he gets, and doesn’t press him.

He just listens, drinking in Bucky’s stories over meals in their kitchen, nodding and smiling and hoping he’s making the right encouraging noises at the right times. He’s both incredibly interested and completely uncertain of how to show that without seeming like he’s monitoring Bucky for progress, or something. 

(The devil of it is, he _is _monitoring Bucky for progress. Steve may not be crazy enough to follow Bucky when he’s out, though he’s sometimes tempted; he doesn’t ask Bucky to tell Steve anything other than what he offers voluntarily, though he’s mostly _always___ tempted by that. But just a few days ago he saw Bucky leave without even slipping a knife into his boot, and Steve will support artisanal coffee all day every day if it’s somehow making Bucky feel like he doesn’t have to fight the world every time he walks out the door.)

Bucky deserves this: space and time to call his own, the right to heal at whatever rate he wants and through whatever methods he chooses, without Steve hovering like a serum-enhanced mother hen. So Steve doesn’t ask questions. He never goes to the coffee shop; Bucky doesn’t ask, and Steve chooses to believe that if he wanted Steve there, Bucky would say. Before he knows it Steve’s taken to avoiding Williamsburg entirely. 

He won’t intrude on the space Bucky’s carved out for himself, he tells himself. Not for all the tea in China. 

(He appreciates the irony, but that’s his metaphor and he’s sticking to it.)

He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, giving Bucky half a city of berth when no one asked him to. He supposes he’s trying to protect Bucky as much as he’s trying to respect his privacy, trying to avoid some potential misstep that will somehow mess up the good thing Bucky has going. Steve is trapped between the clenching desire to be with Bucky all the time and the looming, constant terror that he might slip up in some way when they’re together and maybe mess Bucky up. Steve isn’t actually so full of himself that he thinks he could somehow fuck Bucky up single-handedly—Bucky is strong, stronger than that, stronger than Steve—but he knows that if anyone has the power to dig his hand into Bucky’s insides and _twist_ , unintentionally, it’s him. He knows because it’s the same for him. And sometimes Steve barely knows what _he’s_ doing; he makes it up as he goes along, but that doesn’t seem like enough for Bucky, who deserves better after everything.

The time they spend in the tower between Bucky’s shifts and Steve’s missions and other myriad occupations (that’s what he calls the time he spends at the Googling diner, or watching people in the park, or walking around to see how much the city has changed) becomes a kind of strange, delicate reality, something suspended in time. Suddenly every carefully selected adornment on their floor feels like a commentary on what Steve is doing when he’s in there: celebrating their past; savoring Bucky’s unexpected presence, feeling thankful for it every second of every day; coming up with shared jokes, his and Bucky’s senses of humor altered by the years but still as in tune as they ever were; hearing all about Bucky’s adventures in the outside world.

Some of it reminds Steve of their lives before the war, when they were kids and Steve was sick all the time and Bucky would go to school and bring back Steve’s assignments and all the best stories about what he’d done that day, so that Steve could illustrate the most outrageous part of every story while lying in bed. 

This is nothing like their life before Steve’s lungs got the ultimate boost from Erskine, obviously: Steve is healthy and vibrantly alive, and he spends his time sprinting with Sam and sparring with Clint and Natasha, laughing at Tony’s antics. He even went around the galleries in Chelsea with Pepper the other day, and only called her ‘ma’am’ twice. Steve is surrounded in a way that would have been impossible, then. But there’s something familiar in the way that he and Bucky ensconce themselves in the warmth of their apartment, just the two of them, Bucky telling him stories about places that seem as far removed from Steve as baseball diamonds and basketball courts once were: the coffee shop, the streets around it, the stores in Williamsburg that sell record players that you can fold up like a briefcase and take with you and t-shirts that inexplicably all say, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. Steve thought he was the only one who felt like that old war motto was more applicable now than ever.

“How come you’ve never been to the store?” Bucky asks him one day, completely out of the blue. They’re watching a documentary and Steve is contemplating dinner and he knew the question was coming, but had pretended to himself that it wouldn’t.

He hears his heart pounding in his ears and feels his palms getting slightly damp and asks, “Do you want me to?”

Bucky lifts one shoulder. “I mean, you don’t hafta. But you’re not banned, or something.”

He doesn’t say anything else, turning back to the episode of _The Blue Planet_ that’s playing on the television in their living room. He doesn’t call Steve on his anxiety—which Steve knows he can sense; no one has ever known him like Bucky, and now that they’ve found each other again no one ever _will_ , which is an incredibly appealing thought. Bucky simply watches a pod of dolphins swim across the screen and puts his hand very carefully on Steve’s, squeezing it once before letting go. He slants the quickest of looks at Steve under his eyelashes: curious, fondly chastising, a little exasperated, a lot amused. Steve smiles at him and listens to the rush of blood in his own veins and thinks _I love you more than I loved you seventy years ago, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible_.

Love isn’t the problem, Steve thinks. It never will be. What makes Steve go the long, long way around Williamsburg, what makes his mouth dry at the dinner table sometimes when he knows it’s going to be his turn to speak next, is figuring out how he’s supposed to act around Bucky, how they’re supposed to be. For 21 years from 1923 to 1944 Bucky just _was_ : he was as much a part of Steve as his Ma, as the twinge in his elbow he used to get from where he broke his arm when he was 7, as the blue of Steve’s eyes in the mirror. 

Now Bucky is just as familiar—same wicked grin, same impatient frown, same feeling of belonging to someone and them belonging back when Steve looks at him—but the trick of how they’re supposed to fit, the puzzle-piece _click_ that Steve’s never really thought about before because it just was what it was, is suddenly something that needs to be worked on, figured out. Bucky’s been through hell and Steve’s been through some colder version of it, and there’s no question that they’re sticking together for however long they have left, but it’s not always easy to know _how_. Steve doesn’t completely trust himself to answer the question on his own, and he thinks asking Bucky to help when Bucky has so many other things to figure out and work through isn’t fair—not yet. 

Once upon a time it would have seemed like the easiest thing to lean over and ask, but that’s something the horror of the decades they spent apart took from him, somehow. So Steve sits with his favorite person in the world and watches a creepy underwater sea monster fish eat a smaller underwater sea monster shrimp and thinks, _I think it could be easier than this, and I’m sorry I don’t know how to make it that way yet_.

Bucky squeezes his hand again, something like a warning this time, and says, “Watch the sea monsters, Steve, and stop thinking stupid things.”

Steve’s brain miraculously listens: it goes quiet inside his head, and Steve watches the sea monsters and is grateful for Bucky for the hundred thousandth time in twenty-something years of friendship, Bucky whose voice sounds like reason and like home even when he’s trying to convince Steve that a rusty spiral staircase into a HYDRA base will absolutely hold both their weights, Steve, what, are you scared of a little creaking? 

(The staircase could not, in fact, hold their weights at all. But Bucky had just stood up and dusted himself off after a fourteen-foot fall, and Steve had thought nothing of it because it had felt like Bucky had mostly landed on him, and now he thinks, _how could I not have noticed?_ and _What kind of friend doesn’t realize something that huge is different?_ )

He looks back to the sea monsters, and forces himself to stop.  
  
  
  
The thing about the way Steve feels these days—a low-level constant happy combined with a high-level apprehensive that rears its head every few days—is that it’s never escapable for very long. He’s been hoping the jagged spikes of guilt and worry and sadness and anger at how unfair things have been would ease off with time, smoothed over by his gratitude and his joy at the sight of Bucky’s stupid smiling face, but so far that hope hasn’t really panned out.

A few days later Steve and Natasha are getting a briefing from Hill on an arms dealer they’ve been looking for, a forty-something man in glasses who reminds Steve of Strucker, and that night Steve finds himself creeping around the hallway in front of their bedrooms, trying to hear Bucky’s breathing.

He tried to fall asleep for a few hours, but it wasn’t working, and sometimes sitting in the hallway listening to the steady rhythm of Bucky’s breathing helps. He’s not sure Bucky is asleep—Steve thought he heard someone moving around, but Bucky moves like a ghost so he can’t be sure—and Bucky confirms that suspicion aggressively when he yanks the door open and glares at Steve. He looks confused and vulnerable and furious and understanding, and Steve makes a face back at him that probably looks like an empty white page with eyes drawn on it and says, “I….” before realizing there is no good explanation for this, not one that won’t make Bucky worry.

“I know,” says Bucky, tiredly, saving Steve the trouble of digging himself into a hole trying to explain that he knows Bucky is fine but sometimes he just likes to make sure.

Bucky doesn’t say _I love you too, you immeasurable asshole_ , but his eyes do. Steve feels an awful mixture of ashamed and guilty, but the look on Bucky’s face makes him happy, too, because at least Bucky recognizes where Steve’s desire to creep through the hallways comes from.

Bucky would have every right to follow up his understanding with _now fuck off and let me sleep, Rogers_ , but he doesn’t say that, either: he cracks the door open wider, instead, and makes room for Steve to slip through. After the barest second of indecision Steve does.

They lie on the bed together like they would when they were kids, when Steve fitting on a bed next to anyone was the easiest thing in the world. They don’t touch, but they end up breathing in synchrony and staring at the dark ceiling together, oddly intimate. Neither of them moves—they both fall asleep on their back like corpses these days, when they do—but their hands shift, fingers brushing against each other every so often. Steve can feel himself relaxing, muscle by muscle, the feeling of homecoming and the undemanding nature of the silence immediately drawing him closer to sleep than all the sheep he tried to count two hours ago.

“You have to stop all this worrying,” says Bucky, just as Steve is about to drift off. “You’re gonna give yourself an ulcer, Steve, and not even one of the good ones that you get from drinking too much.”

“I know,” Steve says. He is suddenly painfully, totally awake, hurting at the sound of resignation under the humor in Bucky’s voice.

“I…” Bucky turns his face away slightly. “I’m going to be okay. Even if it doesn’t look it, sometimes.”

Steve wonders if he fell asleep without noticing, because he has this nightmare all the time, that he makes Bucky feel like he’s not doing a good job swimming because _Steve_ feels like he’s drowning.

“Buck,” he says, urgent. “I know. I promise you, I really do.”

Bucky knows Steve well enough to know when he’s being honest, and Steve can feel the tense line of him relax against the bed. Then Bucky says, “ _We’re_ going to be okay.”

 _I know_ , Steve almost says again, but then he realizes that he doesn’t. He’s got faith in Bucky because he always has, and Steve won’t stop trying his hardest, because that’s who he is, but when he thinks about how long Bucky was alone and how hard and deep Steve failed him he honestly doesn’t know if he deserves it, being okay with Bucky. He’s abruptly _furious_ , furious about it all, and Bucky must notice because he says, “Whoa, Steve,” and shifts closer on the bed.

“I just,” says Steve, pushing the words up through the unexpected, but familiar rage clogging his throat, “I just feel like it should be easier—” _easier for us_ , Steve was about to say, but that’s not right: it should be easier for Bucky, but Steve deserves every bit of his guilt and the struggle of life in this century. “And then something happens that reminds me how easy it’s _not_ , and I…”

His hands clench into fists, and Bucky puts his cool metal fingers over Steve’s white knuckles, and says, in a voice that communicates how much he means it, “Steve. I know.”

Steve nods, breathing heavily into the dark, and Bucky breathes with him, sharp and ragged but not pained—just an echo, reminding Steve that he’s there.

“I’m gonna say something that’s going to make you feel worse,” Bucky says, and Steve braces himself for it. “But I think in the long run it’s better for you to hear me say it.”

Steve nods.

“Sometimes when you’re not here I act like a crazy person,” Bucky says. “And then later that same day you look at me with this big dumb lost look on your face, like you can’t figure out how I’m doing so well, and Steve—I scream at the walls in here sometimes, when you’re out; I punch those fancy boxing robots of Tony’s and I break them. I imagine killing every single man who ever put me back in the coffin like I was just a weapon, and not a person; I imagine taking people they love from them and making their children suffer. I want you to think things are okay so you won’t worry, but now I think maybe you need to know that sometimes they’re not. I’m _gonna_ be okay, and so are you, and so are we, you fucking idiot, there’s nothing can make us not okay, but I’m not always okay now. You’re not alone.”

Steve can’t count the number of ways that Bucky has said that to him over the years: a hand on Steve’s shoulder, the crack of a sniper rifle into the winter silence, a gleam in his eye when Steve was thinking about laughing at church and fighting to hold it in, the actual words— _you’re not alone_. Steve knows it, knows it as well as he knows Bucky, and he thinks, suddenly, that if that’s still as true as it ever was then they’re going to figure the rest out. He thinks that and believes it. He hadn’t even realized he didn’t believe it before that moment.

He doesn’t have to say anything for Bucky to know Steve heard him, that Steve is thinking the same thing right back at him, so Steve allows himself to fall asleep in the quiet warmth of that silent understanding, the way he has dozens of nights since he met Bucky in a dirty Brooklyn alleyway.

He wakes up the next morning and watches Bucky’s face shift in the pale morning light, his dark eyelashes fanning across his skin. He kisses Bucky’s cheek gently and Bucky barely stirs, says, “Too early, Stevie,” and rolls onto his other side.

Steve watches Bucky react like he would have eighty years ago, before the army and HYDRA and the world conditioned him into the art of instant wakefulness, and he realizes: Bucky’s doing it too. Leaving the rest of the world and the weight of history on their shoulders outside the door, making sure it’s just the two of them in the tower. 

But there are things that Bucky is doing that are nothing like what Steve does. Bucky goes to O’Hanahan and works at the alchemy factory—no, at the coffee shop, at the _artisanal coffee lounge_ , everything about this world that doesn’t make a lot of sense, probably because it doesn’t, because it’s good practice. Steve is hobbling down the road with five broken bones and he knows Bucky looks the same inside, but Bucky is working at it and Steve is just keeping his eyes on whatever’s in front and hoping that barely coping is somehow going to turn into living, all by its lonesome, just because he loves Bucky that hard and the world owes Bucky that much.

Steve is, as Peggy would say, letting down the side. And he needs to start doing his part.

He takes one last look at Bucky’s sleeping face and pads out of the room. He leaves a note that says _Went for a run with Sam_ on the kitchen table; he doesn’t usually, but he’s pretty sure something that hasn’t changed in the time between 1945 and now is the etiquette of leaving someone in bed without saying anything.

He drinks a glass of milk and splashes some water from the kitchen sink on his face, and then he takes the elevator down to Sam’s floor and knocks on the door and says, “Sam. I—I need help.”

He clearly woke Sam up, but Sam just blinks and keeps his bleary face open and free of judgment, and says, “Hey, Steve. Mornin’, man. Why don’t you come on in?”

He doesn’t mention the time or do anything to suggest that Steve is doing something out of the ordinary; he just leaves the door open behind him and walks toward the kitchen, scratching his belly under his t-shirt.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, as soon as Steve’s seated at his kitchen table. “But if you hadn’t shown up here today I would have cornered you sometime this week.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, because what else can he say? It’s clear that he’s what people mean when they use the words ‘hot mess’ these days.

“Tea okay?” Sam asks. He smiles at Steve and Steve immediately feels like less of a disaster than he felt two minutes ago, less like smudged lines of charcoal all over a piece of paper and more like the hint of a shape. Sam puts a kettle on the stove and continues, “Coffee scares me these days, since Bucky showed us that picture.”

Steve smiles back at him. Sam loves coffee, and Steve’s pretty sure nothing short of a deadly coffee-related epidemic could scare Sam away from it (and maybe not even that), but Sam also knows that tea reminds Steve of the better moments during the war. 

“Tea’s great, thanks,” he says.

Sam puts some teabags into mugs and they watch the kettle as the water boils; Steve tries to relax his posture into something less appropriate for a court marshal and Sam wakes up by increments, hands propped on the kitchen counter behind him as he blinks at Steve.

“Okay, ground rules,” he says when the kettle starts whistling. He pours hot water neatly into their mugs as he speaks. “I’m not speaking in my capacity as a counselor, here. Friends don’t give friends therapy: they teach us that for a reason.”

He looks meaningfully at Steve, and Steve pours a splash of milk into his mug and nods quietly.

“So this is me, Sam Wilson, dangerously competent special operative, blessed with the patience of a saint when it comes to repressed assholes from the last century, sex on wings when I need to be—” He leers at Steve “—but ultimately just a regular guy, and your friend, telling you some stuff I think I’ve figured out in the time I’ve known you,” he says. “If I have it wrong, you should say something.”

“Okay,” says Steve.

“Saying you think someone might have it wrong is important even if you’re talking to someone professionally,” Sam says. Steve isn’t entirely sure what he means, but he doesn’t interrupt. “Usually thinking someone has it completely wrong is a good sign that they have it really right. But not always. And even if they _are_ completely right and you’re being a stubborn ass, my experience is that it’s always better to tell them you feel that way. If you talk about it their wisdom becomes actually useful to you, instead of something you’re pretending to listen to while ignoring all the ways in which they’re trying to be helpful, ways in which they’ve been trained to help.”

“Okay?” Steve says again, slightly more doubtful this time.

“I guess that’s the first thing I want to say,” says Sam, taking a sip of his tea. “I think you need to be in therapy. As someone who is perfectly well aware that you’re doing a fine job of working your way through every day and is proud of you for it but who doesn’t really buy your bullshit because I know you and I love you, and as someone who has seen a lot of people like you in a professional capacity, I think you need to start seeing a therapist immediately. I called around and put together a few suggestions for you, if you decide that it’s a good idea. There’s a woman I think you would love whose office isn’t far from here—you could be there and back in an hour and a half. Tough, just the way you like ’em, totally no-nonsense, in a way I think would really help you. Parents lived through the war in Europe; they moved here just before she was born, and she grew up in your old neighborhood.”

“…okay,” says Steve, after a longer pause this time, because it’s not as easy to agree to that one.

Steve knows he could use the help. He came here looking for it. But the thought of needing so _much_ help makes him feel like there won’t be enough of him left over to help Bucky, somehow.

“Bucky is _not_ your job, Rogers,” Natasha says from behind him. Steve startles so hard in his chair that he almost knocks his mug over. “He’s your friend.”

“Hey, Nat,” says Sam. “There’s water on the stove.”

“Hey Sam,” says Natasha, smiling. “Thanks for calling me.”

“He called you?” Steve asks. He turns to face Sam. “When?” As out of sorts as he feels this morning, he doesn’t think he could have missed that.

“There’s a ‘Steve finally got his head out of his ass’ button on the kitchen counter,” says Natasha as she reaches for a mug, and Steve actually believes her for a second until Sam grins and pulls his phone out of his sweatpants pocket, showing Steve an outgoing text. There’s a single exclamation point on the screen, and nothing else.

A part of Steve makes a last-ditch effort to be indignant, before the rest of him reminds it that this is actually exactly what he wanted.

“Anyway, Rogers,” says Natasha, and Steve looks back at her. She dips her teabag in her mug a few times before dropping it on a saucer that Sam put on the table, staring evenly at Steve the whole time like she’s trying to read something on his face.

(She always does this, makes a mug of tea-colored water and then drinks it. Steve can’t decide if it’s some long-ingrained rationing habit or just how she likes her tea, or whether she just hates tea but pretends to drink it as part of a social ritual. She told him once that tea was a big deal in Russia, and didn’t sound impressed about it.)

“Bucky’s your friend,” Natasha says again. “And frankly, he doesn’t strike me as the type to appreciate that you’re thinking about not getting help so that you can be around for him more. Honestly, you could probably learn a few things from him. He knew what was up when he got here, and he’s never missed an appointment with Pollack since he started. Your philosophy has been, what—they pull you from the ice and you’re going to just power through the minefield and hope your legs don’t get blown off in the process?”

“I thought his name was O’Hanahan,” says Sam, looking at Steve. Then his face creases into a dark frown and he says, “Wait, have you _never been to therapy_ since they found you in the ice?”

“I’ve been to therapy,” says Steve, defensively, because it’s not like he would endanger others that way. The way he felt when he woke up in a New York City that looked like it was on a different planet, he knew he had to talk to someone before he could start active duty again.

“You went to exactly eight sessions with a S.H.I.E.L.D. shrink to meet the minimum requirement and then you called it a day,” says Natasha.

“Oh, like you’re much better?” asks Steve, and he immediately feels petty and childish and ridiculous. 

Natasha doesn’t look angry, though; she quirks a smile at him and says, “Not at first, no. You know that. But how do you think I knew Pollack could handle Barnes and his shit?”

Steve hadn’t thought about it much—thanks to the same innate competence with which she does everything else, he figured. Now he thinks about Natasha’s absolute composure in the face of some of the incredibly awful things they’ve seen together and thinks maybe she’s had more than one type of training to deal with it.

“Wait,” says Sam, shaking his head. “Go back. What kind of idiot thought you were fine after eight sessions? I could tell you weren’t fine from speaking to you for five minutes in a park, for fuck’s sake.”

Steve shrugs. “I made a lot of noise about wanting to get back to serving my country. That seemed to be what they wanted to hear.”

A flash of anger crosses Sam’s face before he firms his jaw and purposefully smoothes out his expression. “So… basically what you’re saying is that you’ve never been to any legitimate therapy since they found you in the ice. Well, as long as you were useful to them, I suppose that’s what mattered.” He says it with crushing bitterness; Steve’s never really heard that tone from him before.

“S.H.I.E.L.D.’s policy of deliberate negligence and willful blindness when it came to assets aside,” says Natasha, lightly but with a meaningful glance at Sam, “Now you’re going to go speak to someone, right?”

“Right,” says Steve. Even if he didn’t agree with them that this is the right thing to do—and he does—he figures they would be happy to provide an immovable object when it comes to this, and he’s hardly an unstoppable force, altered cells or not. “Sam says he found me exactly the kind of scary woman that I hope to marry one day, except this one happens to be a therapist, which is lucky for me.”

“Do you?” asks Sam. 

“Do I what?” asks Steve, nonplussed.

Sam looks down at the table quickly, as if he’s embarrassed, for some reason, and then he continues, “Hope to marry? A scary… woman?”

Steve chuckles, surprised, because he would have thought the answer to that was obvious, but Nat and Sam are both looking at him with such intensity that suddenly he thinks maybe it hasn’t been. Steve can’t imagine that Sam doesn’t know this about him, not with the way Steve has looked at him more than once since they met, but he supposes it’s not the kind of thing you know about someone else until you really know it, maybe not until they say it.

“No. I mean—” Steve laughs again, because he honestly finds the looks on their faces a little funny, the way they’re both clearly caught between their curiosity and some kind of polite reflex about not prying, or maybe some trained habit: not asking, so he doesn’t have to tell. He read all about that. “I mean, I would’ve married Peggy, I guess, if she didn’t wise up before we got to the altar. Maybe. I loved her—I love her—a lot. But it’s never mattered to me, not really: I always looked at both gals and fellas, for sketching when I was younger and then… not for sketching.” He grins at them, for once delighted that he’s not the most flustered person in the room. He thinks Sam might be slightly flushed.

“I thought Peggy was gorgeous, inside and out, but the first person I ever thought was beautiful was Bucky. I’d kind of always expected we’d speak about it, after the war, decide whether it was going to be just us or whether we were going to get married and buy houses next to each other and help raise each other’s kids, be family that way. Things were different, then; it would have been so much harder to choose each other the first way, and I couldn’t assume—he encouraged it, Peggy and me, and he had girls, too, and I kind of always took my cue from him on those things. But I always knew. Just the two of us would have been harder, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t consider it. I know he felt the same. We were gonna talk, when peace came. I knew that; I counted on it. But then… then he fell.”

Natasha lets him have a beat of silence before she asks, “And now?”

“Now it feels like we’re getting a chance all over again, after I thought we’d lost it forever,” Steve answers. “But we still need to talk. Peggy built her life, obviously, and lived it, but there are different reasons not to assume, now. And so many of them are tied up with what he lived, for _years_ , all because I never thought to look for him, all because I never saw that the person I was supposed to know best was different, was the kind of different that could survive the fall.” Steve pauses again. “Nothing I can do about that, much as I want to. But now—there’s probably nothing that can make either of us give up the other, not ever again, but I don’t know how that looks, how _we_ look, not the way I did when we’d never been apart for longer than a day until he enlisted. Since we found him sometimes I feel like we’ve been apart an entire lifetime, even if both of us were asleep for most of it. It still feels endless. Unknown.”

Sam and Natasha are silent, for a long moment this time. Then Sam says, quietly, “I… honestly thought it would take months before you were ready to admit you were in love with him. It’s part—a small part—of why I’m so big on you talking to someone.”

Steve laughs again, a real laugh that wells up from his stomach and fills up his chest. “I’ve always been in love with Bucky.”

“Well, yeah,” says Natasha. “That’s not exactly hard to miss on either of you when you look at each other. But you’re not exactly Mr. Forthcoming with your feelings, Rogers. I think that these are the most words I’ve ever heard you say about something other than strategy. Even when you were hunting him, you mostly asked me about how to be most efficient at it. I heard how important it was to you, and you knew I knew, if only because you kept calling me at 2am, but you never actually _said_ anything. Before that, when I caught you ogling Wilson here, I thought more than once that we might need to get you some pamphlets about sexuality, or something.”

Sam makes a low noise of agreement, half amused and half pained, and nods.

“Sorry,” says Steve, still smiling. He shrugs. “All good on the sexuality front. I mean, he spent all of our twenties calling me ‘punk’, for Christ’s sake.”

They both look at him blankly. “It meant—I mean, it meant kid, like it does today, and troublemaker, but we both knew he said it partly because back then it also… you know what, never mind.”

“I’m Googling that the minute we’re done here,” Natasha says. “I hope you know.”

“No promises that I won’t Google it _before_ we’re done here,” says Sam, and the two of them grin at each other. “I bet it’s kinky. Man. Captain America. Blowing. My. Mind.” He turns to smile more conspiratorially at Nat. “Which is so appropriate, given I spent most of my adolescence and at least part of last year imagining he might bl—”

“ _Any_ way,” says Steve, trying to get the conversation back on track. They keep grinning at each other, but he can tell their attention is completely back on him, so he keeps going. “Therapy, minus the sexuality pamphlets. I can do that. Sam, can you help me set it up? I could go see her this week.” 

“Done,” says Sam.

“And…” Steve adds, “I should speak to you guys more, clearly. I—I’m sorry about that.” He genuinely means the apology. He trusts them, and while he thinks they know that it’s also evident that they haven’t felt trusted with things that Steve thought were obvious. “Is that it?”

They exchange another look, this time a look that promises nothing good, if Steve knows his looks (and he does: Peggy can do more with her eyes than most people can do with an army). Steve can feel his shoulders tense, but he asks, “What? Something else I should do?”

“Hey, now,” says Sam, gently. “There’s really nothing you ‘should’ do, as far as I’m concerned. Not even the therapy. You need to find what you think is best on your own. Like I told you when you woke me up at ass o’clock earlier, I’m not your counselor, and I don’t want to be. But… if you’re asking me as your friend, as someone who cares about you? Another thing I think is that you might want to consider not living together. At least for a while.”

 _Not living together with whom?_ Steve thinks, stupidly, and then the answer cuts through him like a scalpel. He bites back the instinctive _Hell no_ that rises up in his throat: he thinks this is what Sam meant when he said that sometimes thinking someone is wrong is a sign that they’re right. Because he thinks Sam is so, so wrong.

Steve has to concentrate on just how tightly he wants to grip his mug: tightly enough to feel it, but not tightly enough to break it. He breathes in and out a couple of times and tries to consider what Sam is saying, and why.

“You know,” Natasha says, looking at him knowingly, and Steve focuses completely on her because he’ll take any other information he can, right now. “I got taken pretty young. But I have a hazy memory of being a pretty lonely kid, even before. I’m not even sure I had one friend.”

Natasha doesn’t speak much about her past, but Steve knows enough to know that she hasn’t had much of anyone since she was a toddler, that the people who trained her forced her into adulthood before most kids are sent to elementary school.

“I had one friend,” Sam pipes up. “Until high school, pretty much, I had one friend. Pete Winston. In freshman year I grew six inches and I started playing ball, and my sister Angelica hammered some social skills into me, because even though she was in middle school she was already galaxies cooler than I was. She made me buy some new jeans and stop hanging out at the picnic table behind the parking lot every lunch period, and suddenly I had more than one friend. But I don’t think I ever outgrew that feeling, of knowing that you had one person who had chosen you. Being totally sure of that, but also afraid they might vanish any minute. That drive to really work for it, to make sure they stuck around. When I met Riley, it also felt like that, but bigger.”

Natasha picks it up again. “As far back as I can remember, I got taught that making friends was a weakness. But as I got older I realized there were people who really bled with you—not just people you bled alongside, but people you really bled _with_ , and I learned that they get tangled up with you, in barbed ways that don’t come loose no matter how much you’re trained into something different, how much others try to push you apart. They don’t come loose no matter how hard you shake.”

The two of them look at Steve, clearly waiting for him to speak. Steve’s not really sure what they’re expecting to hear, but he thinks maybe it’s, “I don’t know if I need to say this, since you both obviously know, but Bucky was my only friend until I met Peggy. For the twenty-one years before that, I only had one friend, and before Bucky I didn’t have any friends at all. I met him the day I turned five, when I picked a fight with some neighborhood kids during a 4th of July party on our block; some of my very first memories are about him. And… I’m not sure I would have really called Peggy my ‘friend’, not really, not until after the ice. She was something else. The Commandos were my brothers, like Nat is saying. But Bucky was my only friend. And my brother on top of that. And—everything else.”

“Right. So none of us really learned how to do friendship the way a lot of kids do,” Sam says. “I mean—I don’t mean that the way we do friendship is wrong.” He says _we_ , but he’s looking at Steve. “I look at you and Barnes and I think… we do what we can to live our lives in the best way we know how, and sometimes what happens is that we end up a little crazy about people. Natasha got brainwashed—” he smiles to soften it, but he doesn’t have to, because his tone is soft enough— “And I was so uncool it hurt, though by the sounds of it not as uncool as you.” He smiles at Steve this time. “And you and Bucky… the neighborhood you grew up in, and whatever things you didn’t have, and whatever things you did—you grew up leaning against each other, crooked but possibly better for it. And I don’t think any of us need that,” he says, gesturing off-handedly at Steve’s mark, “to see how you two belong together. I don’t think any kind of upbringing did that: you two always look like you’d take on the world to protect each other, to stay together. The whole world and anyone else that dares come knocking. And I _get_ it, because I’ve had some version of it, something less absolute but no less true. Normally, I would say being a little crazy about someone like that isn’t the end of the world.”

“But when all of a sudden you live in times where the end of the world is a real possibility,” says Natasha, “Where part of what happened to you two in the last seventy years was the world ending for each of you, in different ways—well, in that case being a little crazy about someone seems like it might be enough to make everything more of an uphill battle than it needs to be.”

“Did you two rehearse this?” Steve asks them, trying to sound mocking and failing. He can’t be annoyed about their handholding because—they’re right. That’s exactly what Bucky has always felt like, to Steve: essential, his friendship fragile and precious but also the greatest constant of Steve’s life. He doesn’t know how to be without Bucky; he couldn’t really even bring himself to try, back in 1945, and though Peggy had convinced him that he had no choice _but_ to try after the ice, when Bucky had shown up it had somehow stopped feeling like trying. More complicated—what with finding their way back to each other, and being desperate to be good for Bucky, good enough for _them_ —but not like trying. As if things were the way they were supposed to be, again.

“We rehearsed it a little bit,” Natasha says, smirking. “Wilson couldn’t be trusted to stay on script otherwise. Some of the things he comes up with, I have to tell you—I’m not really sure he has any kind of therapy credentials.”

Sam makes a rude gesture in her direction, and turns back to Steve. He’s grinning again. “Look, all we’re saying is: we get it. We get what it’s like to be lonely, and to have a person that makes it better. Ideally you have _people_ who make it better, but a person, singular, is okay too. It’s okay to want to fix him, to want more than anything to drag him upright just because you love him that much. I told you before that I’ve been where you are, totally bent double with the strain of it and desperate to keep going.” His smile turns slightly rueful. “However you two want to be together when you’re both healthier, I think—I think you’re going to figure it out. But right now, when you’re still so lost and so angry and both of you have a lifetime of regrets and grief inside you… I think the best thing you can do for each other is make space to let that out, to make sure it doesn’t get tied up with who you’re going to become. As individuals or together.”

“So, I don’t want to butt in here,” comes another voice from behind them, and Steve actually does spill tea over his hands this time, jerking around. “But I was looking for Romanoff and then Jarvis told me she was here and that you were here too, Rogers, and I think you’re finally having that conversation about how you keep watching Barnes like you want to keep him in a locked tower and never allow him to let down his hair, so I thought I’d come on up.”

“Tony,” Natasha says, warningly, using his first name like a weapon.

“No, no,” says Tony, holding up his hands. “Hear me out. I actually have something of value to add here.”

It almost defies belief, but he actually stops and looks at Steve for approval before continuing. Steve nods tightly.

“So, Rogers, the thing is, you’re a smotherer,” he begins. Sam frowns, but Tony barrels on, “No, honestly, I’m not insulting you. Really. Take it from me: I’m _the_ smotherer. I even smother smotherers, man, it’s like a special gift brought on by a solitary childhood and an unfortunate experience in captivity and too much money and creativity to smother people _with_. Pepper once asked me if I didn’t want to stop dating her and pay someone instead to get me one of those cave-dwelling fish that suck along the bottom of the ocean and only ever use one eye to look up, because that’s how flat and suffocated my version of love made her feel.”

Natasha and Sam snort, and Steve cracks a smile. He remembers that fish from _The Blue Planet_ , and… it’s not an inaccurate description of how Tony can be.

“So, given my unique expertise in this field and the nature of your problem, I thought I’d just come up to tell you,” Tony says, “That you can learn how to be less afraid to lose someone. You can learn how to protect them and help them without feeling like you have to keep them tied up. Wait, that sounds like I’m a serial killer. I don’t mean it that way; let’s forget that unfortunate analogy. What I’m saying is—it’s doable. And you don’t have to stop loving them as hard or as desperate as you do, not one bit. You just have to learn to show it differently.”

He shrugs, self-deprecating, and is clearly about to make a move to go when Sam says, “Sit down, Tony. I think the water in the kettle is still sort of warm. Maybe.”

Tony beams at him, then proceeds to perform some complicated ritual with a tea bag, like he’s never seen one before. Natasha watches him with barely concealed disdain, and very carefully concealed affection.

They all drink their tepid tea for a couple of minutes, like people who belong in a room together even when there’s nothing else to say. Steve steels himself to ask what he needs to ask, but before he can Natasha says, “I know a guy. He can hook you up with the right kind of place. Near here, if you want.”

Of course she knows what Steve was going to say.

“No,” he answers, because if he’s cutting himself in half then he’s not going to a midtown high-rise to cry about it. “Brooklyn.”

“Of course,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. Natasha is already typing something into her phone.

“Wait, wait, how did this turn into you moving out, all of a sudden?” Tony says, waving his arms and looking panicked.

“I need to stop hovering on our floor waiting for Bucky to come home and worrying about how he is or I’m going to go crazy and probably take him along for the ride,” Steve says. “You know that.” Tony begins to nod in agreement but then looks like he’s about to argue for the sake of it, so Steve continues, “Plus, Tony—you’re smothering me. You’re smothering me with _1930s radios_.”

The two of them smile at each other, and then Tony’s grin widens and he says, “Fine, fine, you don’t have to be mean about it, jeez. Captain America, actually kind of a dick. If only kids knew. Is Barnes going with you? I mean, not with you with you. But with you when you move out, to his own place?”

“I don’t know,” says Steve. He realizes he means it: he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t feel the usual disquiet that has accompanied not knowing, these last few months. “I’ll have to ask. I’ll ask him when he gets home later.”

Natasha leans over to show something on her phone to Sam, and Sam shakes his head and points to something on the corner of the screen. Steve supposes he ought to look, too, in case they’re discussing his potential home, but… he trusts them. They know him. Not like Bucky, but they do. Steve finishes his tea and sits quietly, happy to be surrounded by the three of them. Maybe it’s true that for a long time he had a person, singular, but now he definitely has people. He’s going to make sure they know that.

“Well, I’m afraid I have to get back to the lab, kids,” Tony says after a while, looking at something on his own phone. He stands up and throws them a jaunty salute.

“I’m staying here to talk to Wilson,” Natasha says. “But I’ll be down later. You’re probably going to need to buy a building.”

Tony nods like she just told him he should put his mug in the sink before he leaves. “Sure. Talk to the boss, tell her I approved it. Not that she gives a damn about whether I approve anything. Which… is probably for the best.”

Buy a building? Steve shakes his head and tries to remember that Tony is not as crazy as he seems, that none of them are, and he stands up to follow Tony out. He’ll wait to see what Natasha says, but he doesn’t think anyone ought to be buying any buildings.

He and Tony don’t say anything on the way up, but when the elevator doors open on Steve and Bucky’s floor Steve gives Tony a fast, hard hug, and says, “I’m going to be over a lot, Tony, okay? I promise.”

“Okay, Steve,” says Tony, not looking directly at him, but smiling faintly at the ground. He never calls Steve ‘Steve’. Steve smiles back. “The radios and I will be waiting for you, I guess.”  
  


…

 

 

Bucky’s gone out by the time Steve gets back. He’s scrawled something underneath Steve’s note about going running with Sam: _Okay. I’m opening the store, then going for a “run” with O’Hanahan. Later, punk._ Steve snorts.

He thinks about making himself some pancakes, sitting down to read the paper that Tony thinks Steve cancelled when Tony showed him the digital subscriptions linked to his tablet. He could force himself to read all of it, even the business section, make a morning of it. He decides against it; he realizes, suddenly, that he wants to be outside. He pulls down the tub of protein powder that he and Bucky both pretend they didn’t buy and throws four scoops in the blender with some fruit and some milk, and then he drinks the whole thing straight out of the blender glass and goes to find some shoes.

He crosses the street and looks at Stark Tower as he stretches, craning his head around to look at the Grand Central clock, leaning over to press his face to his knees. He doesn’t really need to stretch, but he’s gotten into the habit, running with Sam. He pulls his arms over his head and reaches up toward the sky and then he runs, careful not to bump into anyone, cautiously keeping his head tilted down to avoid people’s gazes.

He runs twenty blocks down Madison, cuts through Madison Square Park and then across 23rd to the river on the West Side before rounding his way over to the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s drizzling, which means that people aren’t packed in side-to-side on the walkway the way they normally are, but it’s still pretty crowded. He thinks a few people recognize him, but he just ducks his chin further into his chest and runs faster, unwilling to slow down even for the kids, though he feels sort of guilty about it. He races across Cadman Plaza and then up through the fruit streets, heading for the Carousel and Brooklyn Bridge Park. He has no intention of stopping until he sees an elderly woman weighed down with three shopping bags, picking her way gingerly down Middagh Street in the rain.

“Ma’am, would you let me help you carry your bags?” he asks, and she looks up sharply, clearly suspicious. 

When she gets a good look at his face her expression relaxes—though he wouldn’t exactly call it friendly—and she holds her bags out wordlessly, reaching up to adjust the silk scarf tied around her head.

Steve takes the bags and she starts off again, heading west down the street. Steve keeps pace with her for five houses before she stops and holds her hands out for her bags again.

“It’s really no trouble to walk you all the way home, ma’am,” he says.

“I know,” she answers. “We’re here.”

She points at a rickety house set behind two bushes that clearly haven’t been trimmed in years, and Steve says, “Do you live on the first floor? I can help you get your bags upstairs if you don’t, ma’am. If you want me to.”

He tries to communicate that he’s not about to rob her by hunching his shoulders in slightly, and she laughs. “My name is Laura Butler,” she says. “So stop calling me ‘ma’am’.”

“Yes, Mrs. Butler,” Steve says obediently, as she fits her key in the lock and shoots him a sideways look that says she knows exactly what he’s up to. She reminds Steve of his Ma. Or Bucky’s Ma, maybe, who was always a little meaner but a peach once you got to know her. “I’m Steve Rogers.”

“Nice to meet you, Steve,” she says, and Steve can tell from the way she’s looking at him that she recognizes him, though she doesn’t say.

The door creaks open into a wooden staircase, a hallway with two doors running down the side into a back garden. There are paintings and photographs and sketches covering the walls, and frames littering both sides of the hallway, too. Mrs. Butler climbs the stairs slowly onto the next floor, where paintings are also stacked two deep against the wall, before unlocking another door and stepping through it.

“Well, here we are,” she says, gesturing to show he can put the shopping bags down on the dining room table. Steve tries not to be too obvious about looking around, but the house is comforting and familiar in a way he can’t quite place. When she doesn’t make any clear sign of wanting him gone immediately he looks around more carefully and sees boxes in the bedroom, a dust outline on the mantle where books used to sit.

“Are you moving, ma’am?” he asks.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business, Steve Rogers,” she says, but she’s smiling as she says it. He waits, and she says. “Yes. Barry—he lives downstairs, he owns the house—is moving in with his daughter in Wisconsin. I’ve been living here for sixteen years, since my husband died and Barry converted the house into apartments, and he charges me and the three kids upstairs a song to live here; I think one of them’s a clarinetist, because you can hear him or her practicing sometimes. But Barry’s son says he should sell the house now that he’s moving, and he’s right—the house next door sold for three million dollars, the kids told me. And as long as we’re all here this place will just keep falling apart slowly.”

Steve looks around: he can see what she means, he supposes, cracks in the plaster above the wainscoting and the slightly musty smell of the whole place.

“Do you think—” Steve asks, before catching himself in the ridiculousness of the thought.

“Do I think what, Steve Rogers?” Mrs. Butler says.

“Just Steve, ma’am,” he says. “I was just thinking… if you could stay here, would you? It’s such a nice house.”

“Sure I would,” she says. “But Barry’s getting too old to get by on his own, and they really ought to sell. We’re all moving out at the end of next month; they have a buyer lined up and everything. I think the kids are going to Queens.”

“Is that why there all those paintings lined up outside, for the move?” Steve asks, and she laughs.

“Oh, no,” she says. “That’s just Barry. When I first moved in here there were two, three paintings in the hallway downstairs, ‘just waiting for a place on the wall’, he kept telling me. He claims he doesn’t buy new things, so I told him they must be breeding, because all three floors are stuffed full of them, now.”

She looks exasperated and fond, and Steve shifts on his feet, hearing the wooden floors creak and making up his mind. She’s looking at him shrewdly, like she can tell how furiously he’s thinking, and Steve nods at her before saying, “It was very nice to meet you, ma’am. Thank you for letting me help with your bags.”

“Laura,” she chides. “And you’re welcome.”

“Laura,” he says, smiling at her. She smiles back at him like she thinks maybe he’s a little funny in the head, but he doesn’t mind.

“Nice to meet you too, Steve,” she says, finally. “Thank you for the help.”

He waves at her before making his way down the narrow, uneven stairs, careful not to bump into anything. When he gets outside he stands out of the rain in the inadequate shelter of the front door and takes out his phone. When Tony picks up on the other end he sounds distracted, and Steve can hear the whirring of machines in the background.

“What’s up, Cap?” he asks.

“Tony,” Steve says. “Were you serious about buying a house? Well, maybe… half a house? I don’t know; I don’t know how much money I have in the bank.”

There’s a long silence. “I can ask Jarvis for you, if you want. I’m pretty sure we got you online banking, not that you care what that is. What house is this?”

“It’s in Brooklyn, right by the fruit streets,” says Steve. “But it comes with people.”

“It… comes with people,” Tony repeats.

“Yep,” Steve says. “A woman named Laura Butler and three kids. Apparently one is a clarinetist.”

“You know what,” Tony says, cautiously, doing something to make the machines go quiet in the background. “I think you better call Natasha for this. Or Pepper. But yeah, if you need me to, I’ll help you buy a house. A house that comes with people. Just tell them to tell me what to do, okay?”

“Thank you, Tony,” Steve says, primly, aware that Tony is about to call Pepper or Colonel Rhodes so he can tell them that Steve’s gone crazy, what does Tony do, can they really put a national treasure into a mental hospital, what will people think. “You’re a pal,” Steve continues, and he means it, though he tries to make it as upbeat and glib as possible to freak Tony out even more.

“Sure,” Tony says, faintly. “You, too.”

Steve grins even though Tony can’t see it, trying not to laugh. Then he hangs up and scrolls down to Natasha’s number, looking up at the house and hoping she can help.  
  
  
  
When Steve finally gathers up the courage to tell Bucky that he’s moving, the conversation goes much more easily than expected. Bucky smirks at him the whole time Steve is trying to stammer out an explanation, but in the end he makes it easy, saying, “Sounds like a good idea,” before letting something soft and tender show in his eyes, telling Steve he understands. Steve lets out the breath he was holding and goes to figure out how he’s going to go through with it, now that the talk’s out of the way.

Natasha forbids Steve from moving in while there’s still creeping damp in the basement—who knew—so Tony or someone ends up paying movers to help Mr. Saunders—Barry—pack up faster than expected. Steve would feel bad about kicking him out of his house, but he’s clearly thrilled to be moving in with his daughter and grandchildren. Steve shakes his hand when he leaves and tells him that he can come back any time, that it’ll always be his house, and Mr. Saunders says, “Damn right it will be,” and heads down the street with his son without a backward glance.

Laura is less than thrilled to be moved into a hotel for four weeks while a construction crew invades the house, and she glares balefully at Steve the entire time he’s helping carry her suitcase down the stairs. Steve figures they have time for her to forgive him, and it helps that the three kids (not really kids, maybe just a little bit younger than Steve, and clearly all involved in the kind of relationship that means only one of their beds really looks slept in, though there are things in all three rooms) chatter at her enthusiastically the whole way to the Waldorf. She tells them to quit yapping at her more than once, but she’s smiling by the time they get there. Her cantankerousness doesn’t seem to faze them one bit; Steve hopes they’re going to show him their trick before he has share a house with her full time.

When Steve is finally ready to move in, he and Bucky gather all his boxes in the parlor to be taken down, pretending it’s not a big deal. Natasha, Clint, and Sam are coming by to help, and Steve leaves Bucky greeting them by the elevator before he sneaks away to Bucky’s bedroom to steal something. Once he’s in there he realizes he has no idea what he’s going to take, but one quick glance at the little mountain of junk Bucky has on his bedside table and he sees it: a smooth, round stone that Bucky picked up god knows where. The beach, maybe. He rode the train up there last week. Steve leaves a pencil sketch of the new house propped up on the table in exchange; once upon a time he would have taken the stone without a second thought, but now he needs to make sure Bucky knows that his belongings are his own, even if Steve needs to temporarily appropriate one.

Clint drives the U-Haul down to Brooklyn; Steve has no idea why they had to rent a truck-sized one, since he has all of sixteen boxes and ten of them are full of things that Tony forced him to take from Steve’s and Bucky’s floor, but when he comes downstairs to the garage there are people in uniforms putting a mattress and furniture into the back, and Steve can see they’ll need the space. When he looks around Tony’s standing by the elevator, shrugging like he doesn’t know what’s going on or what the delivery people are doing there. He waves at Steve once before jerking his thumb back toward the elevator, mumbling something about Jarvis and the lab and Steve visiting soon before disappearing behind the sliding doors.

Steve feels a strange and unexpected flash of pride, an unwillingness to take all of these things from Tony when he’s perfectly able to get his own furniture, but Bucky sidles up to him and says, “Let him have something, at least, Rogers. Letting you buy the whole house yourself probably made all the Stark in him wither up and die, you know?”

“I saw three beds going in that truck,” Steve complains. “What do I even need three beds for?”

“Hey, you never know,” says Bucky, laughing at him and shoving him gently toward the cab of the truck. 

Clint maneuvers the U-Haul onto the sidewalk on Middagh Street and the kids—Noah, Alex, and Penelope, Steve really ought to stop calling them ‘the kids’—all come out to help unload Steve (and Tony’s) stuff. Between the eight of them it only takes about forty-five minutes, and Clint gives them a sharp salute and promises to come around for the housewarming (“You better have a housewarming, Rogers, and there better be some decent whiskey for me to drink after I devoted my Sunday to moving you down here, am I understood?”) before driving off to return the truck and the third bed, which really doesn’t fit in the house.

“Thank you so much for helping us move my things in; you didn’t have to,” Steve tells the kids.

“No, hey, man, totally our pleasure,” says Noah, carefully placing some of Tony’s china into Steve’s kitchen cupboards.

“Steve,” Penelope says, seriously. “We’d started looking for places, but honestly, we were pretty much looking down a one-way road to a studio above a crack den in Queens before you showed up and decided you were going to buy this place. We will help you move _any time you want_ , as long as it’s not out of here.”

“Plus,” Alex says, “I found out yesterday that we no longer have to shower by running a hose from the sink into the bath, and I have to tell you, that alone would have been enough to make us want to help you carry all the mattresses in the world in here. Barry is _awesome_ , but showering using an actual working shower, it turns out, is also pretty great.”

Ninety minutes later most of Steve’s things are put away, magically, and Bucky ducks out into the hallway and returns with a large, unwieldy-looking package in his arms. Laura follows him in, shooting her usual suspicious glance at Steve as Bucky carries whatever it is he’s got into the empty room in the back with the big windows facing the garden. All the paintings that Barry couldn’t take with him are stacked neatly in there, waiting for Steve to decide what to do with them.

“I see you’re all settled in,” Laura says, and Steve stops the _Yes ma’am_ just before it makes it out of his mouth. She looks like she might have murdered him if he’d let it escape.

“I’m Laura Butler,” she says to Sam and Natasha, smiling without a trace of the utter disdain she seems to reserve for Steve. Sam and Nat shake her hand and introduce themselves, and when Bucky comes back in the room he also hurries forward, smirking at Steve as he passes. He thinks it’s hilarious that Laura hates Steve.

“I’m James Barnes, ma’am,” he says, and Steve winces in expectation of the _don’t call me ma’am_ , but it doesn’t come.

Instead Laura says, “I know,” and to Steve’s utter disbelief, she _blushes_ , not quite meeting Bucky’s gaze.

Tony and Natasha have floated what they assure Steve is a convincing story about Bucky’s survival and reappearance to the relevant authorities, with Fury’s help. Steve is not the greatest fan of subterfuge, as everyone knows, but the only people who could have identified Bucky as the ghost in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s and HYDRA’s files are either dead or lack the credibility to do anything with their knowledge, and if Tony and Natasha can buy Bucky peace Steve isn’t complaining about the methods. If the wider public asks, they don’t intend to deny that Bucky is alive and kicking, but the public doesn’t know to ask, and they all plan to keep it that way as long as possible—that’s what Bucky wants. The kids were surprisingly nonchalant about it, though they traded a few shocked glances when Steve first introduced them to Bucky. When Steve asked them to keep it quiet because Bucky had been through a lot and needed the space, they didn’t bat an eyelid, and when they promised they would, Steve could tell they meant it. Laura’s equally easy acceptance immediately kicks her up in Steve’s estimation, even if she is standing unnecessarily close to Bucky, if you ask Steve.

Steve can see the gleam in Bucky’s eyes from fifteen feet away as he takes Laura’s hand with a grin, and he rolls his own eyes before going to investigate whatever Bucky left in the back room. When he turns the corner he’s not really surprised to see an easel sitting in the corner, positioned where the light is best, a blank canvas—the really good stuff—already in place. His heart clenches, something molten and pleased working its way through his chest.

When he makes his way back to the living room the kids let him know they’re headed back upstairs, let them know if he needs anything, anytime, honestly, please. Steve tells them he’s happy that they’re his tenants and tells Alex he’ll take music in payment for buying the house, sometime, if Alex is willing to let Steve hear him play.

“Sure, man,” says Alex, looking at Steve like he didn’t expect him to say that, and the three of them clatter their way back upstairs.

“Can I escort you back to your apartment, Laura?” Bucky asks.

She blushes _again_ before replying, “That would be lovely, James, thank you.”

“I hope I’ll see you soon, Laura,” Steve says, reminding himself that being jealous of an eighty-year old would be a low point somewhere between the 1926 fairground peanuts and trying to go on the internet for the first time while Fury was watching.

“I’m sure you will,” she replies icily, before gently placing her hand in the crook of Bucky’s arm. Bucky takes a moment to wiggle his eyebrows at Steve before walking her out the door.

“That woman is about to steal your boyfriend, Rogers,” Natasha says. “And how.”

“Outdone by an actual senior citizen, man, that’s when you know your game is bad,” Sam adds.

“Get out, both of you,” Steve says.

They don’t even try to hide how hard they’re laughing at him as they turn to go. Natasha busses him on the cheek and says, “I’m with Clint on the housewarming, Rogers. Let us know when, okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Okay. Thanks for helping me move in. But absolutely zero thanks for siding with Mrs. Butler, assholes.”

“Steve,” Sam says, “That woman looks like she knows how to make barbecue from people she doesn’t like, you think I’m going to do something to piss her off like you did? She reminds me of my grandma. If she ever asks me about ‘that no-good Steve Rogers’ or something, I’m just going to nod and tell her she’s completely right, and I’ve always had a bad feeling about you.”

“I’m bringing Peggy over to meet her asap,” Natasha says.

“I’m serious,” Steve says. “Get out.”

“No love!” Sam says.

“That’s okay, Bucky’s getting enough love for all of us,” Natasha says, solemnly, and doesn’t give Steve a chance to reply before she calls, “Bye, Barnes!” up the stairs and drags Sam out after her. 

Steve starts re-arranging his books to his liking on the shelves while he waits for Bucky to come back downstairs. It takes longer than Steve would strictly prefer, considering, but Steve has just enough books to not be completely faking the exercise by the time he hears Bucky’s feet on the creaking wood.

“That woman is honestly _delightful_ ,” he says when he comes back in, heading into the kitchen. 

Steve hears the faucet running and Bucky comes back out holding a glass of water, completely unable to hide his grin as he drinks.

“I hate you all,” Steve says. “And yet, she somehow hates me more than I hate all of you combined.”

“Aw, come on, Steve,” says Bucky, settling into the sofa. “She’s just a little sore ’cause her friend is gone and she had to completely change her life around for four weeks while strangers rattled around her house, but she’ll get over it. I think she’ll probably punish you for a coupla weeks and then she’ll start baking you cookies. I ain’t ever met a woman over fifty who didn’t want to feed you cookies, and judging by our conversation upstairs, I don’t think she’s about to become the first.”

“She sure wants to feed _you_ cookies,” Steve says, and he knows what Bucky’s going to say before he even—

“Oh, I’m pretty sure cookies have nothing to do with it,” Bucky says, grinning. Steve flips him the bird—as expressions from after they died go, ‘flipping the bird’ is right up there, he reflects not for the first time—and Bucky says, “But don’t worry, I only want to have cookies with you, and I told her so.”

“You didn’t,” says Steve, thinking that if she disliked him before she’s going to hate him now, for sure.

“I didn’t,” Bucky agrees, and pats the sofa next to him. He turns abruptly serious and says, “She won’t say anything. I didn’t even have to ask; she offered.”

Steve feels a sharp wave of gratitude: gratitude to have stumbled his way into this house with four good people in it. 

“Have you decided whether you’re going to move out of the tower, too?” he asks as he sits, not wanting to push, but still curious.

“Nah,” Bucky says. “I think I’ll stay in the Stark Museum of the 1930s, 40s, and Beyond.” Steve smiles. “He said he’s going to take a look at my arm next week, and it might take a while for him to do whatever he does. Probably better for me to stick around until then, at least, right?”

“Right,” Steve says. He likes the thought of Bucky in the same familiar place, however unsettling the period furniture might be: it’s the first place he had with Bucky, the second time, and that makes it special despite how terrifying the cuckoo clock in the dining room is. Jarvis had been wrong when he’d said the only taxidermized animal in the whole place was the strangely threatening partridge in the guest bathroom.

“Can you come by next week, when Stark looks at my arm?” Bucky says, and if Steve didn’t know him as well as he does he wouldn’t notice the almost imperceptible tension that settles into Bucky’s shoulders when he says it.

“Yeah, of course,” he says, bumping his arm against Bucky’s. 

He can tell Bucky’s a little nervous about it, sure, but it’s nothing like the almost feral distrust that he felt toward everyone when he arrived. Bucky is—he is honestly doing so well that Steve doesn’t know who to thank for it sometimes: Bucky for his determination, Tony and Natasha and Sam and Pepper and Clint for the quiet way in which they’ve closed ranks and given Bucky a space in which to do it; O’Hanahan for his dogged insistence that Bucky is going to walk out of his office sooner rather than later; whatever or whoever is responsible for placing Steve and Bucky in this reality, and not one where they lost each other permanently. Bruce says that’s a thing.

“I’m glad to be back in Brooklyn,” Steve says.

“In this falling-down house that you picked because of the previous owner’s painting-hoarding problem,” Bucky interjects.

Steve doesn’t deny it. “But it’s going to be strange being here without you,” he says, instead.

Bucky gives him a long look. “We’re not going to be in different places forever, Steve.”

“No,” says Steve, half-agreement and half-challenge, because he’s ready to fight for it even though he knows he won’t have to. 

He looks back at Bucky, at the healthy blush of his cheeks, at the roundness of his shoulders now that he’s eating well and living well and being loved like he should be, at the incredible technology of his arm, which Tony will make even more incredible, resting gently on his familiar pokey knees, and before he knows it he’s leaning forward and dropping a tiny kiss at the corner of Bucky’s smiling mouth.

Bucky smiles even more, a sharp curve against Steve’s lips, and Steve drags his nose up Bucky’s cheek and kisses him again, a little firmer this time, and though they’ve never done this before it feels exactly like Steve knew it would: like coming home.

He wets his lips and takes Bucky’s bottom lip between his, and Bucky leans into it; Steve licks his way into Bucky’s mouth and curls his body around Bucky’s, and Bucky steadies Steve with cool metal fingers on his lower back and pushes back into him.

They kiss for a long time. It’s not hurried, but it’s not slow, either; it’s the quiet, languid familiarity of their long history together edged with just a sliver of the urgency that the world has taught them. You never know when something will be taken away from you: they both learned that in the hardest way possible.

When Steve finally pulls back to look at Bucky properly, the late afternoon light is slanting through the window, turning Bucky’s eyes a dark and unfathomable blue. Steve spares a moment to ask whoever’s listening to help him be worthy of this, of them, of the gift of something he’d thought was gone forever, and Bucky smiles at him and kisses him one final time, gentle but heavy with promise.

“I think I may actually be able to see your brain pulsing at the edges right now, Rogers. I’m not really one to talk, I guess, but you need to relax some. We don’t have to figure it all out right this instant, do we?”

Steve smiles at him slowly, happy and shamelessly boneless with it, but—of course Bucky’s not wrong—already busy thinking about how he’s going to make sure he can keep this thing safe and whole and untouched by the harsh edges of the world.

“Come on,” Bucky says, standing up and dragging Steve up after him. He hands Steve his keys and his wallet and his phone and shuffles them both out the door, locking up with his own copy of the key. He gives Steve one more kiss, right there against the door of his new house, and fiddles with his phone before saying, “Okay, I’ve got an Uber coming.”

“Where are we going?” Steve asks, actively preventing himself from going down the rabbit hole that is thinking about what being able to order a car by tapping on your phone is doing to society.

“I’m going back to the tower,” Bucky says. “You should take your bike to see Peggy, so your brain doesn’t explode like you’ll let it if you just sit in your empty house thinking the way you’re gonna.”

“It’s not really an empty house,” Steve says. “It has a woman who hates me and three kids who won’t hear her murder me through the new insulation.”

“All part of her strategy to have me move in and marry her, Rogers,” Bucky says. “You, of all people, have to respect a woman with a plan.”

Steve smiles, though his heart jumps around like a bird at _move in_. “She only wants you because she doesn’t know how fucking annoying you are. Once she has you she’ll probably shoot you too.”

“Probably,” Bucky says, and doesn’t let Steve reach for him one more time before he slides into the car that pulls up to the curb, though his eyes twinkle at Steve the whole time.  
  
  
  
Steve is not the biggest fan of the tower where Peggy lives these days, with its beautiful view of the river and its beautiful marbled lobby and its inexplicably beautiful staff. Peggy fits in the way she always does: within a week all the people working on her floor were appropriately in awe of her, and their fearful admiration doesn’t seem to be diminishing as the weeks pass.

When Steve walks in, water dripping off the end of his nose and his hair matted to his forehead thanks to another summer rain, a staff member appears out of nowhere right before he’s about to walk into Peggy’s room. She’s holding a towel, which she extends to Steve with a little smile.

“Thanks,” he says, embarrassed because he can’t remember her name. That’s another thing he doesn’t like about this place, the endless rotation of people. He doesn’t know how Peggy’s supposed to keep them all straight when he barely recognizes staff between one visit and the next.

“You’re welcome, Captain Rogers,” she answers.

Steve hands back the towel when she reaches for it, but she doesn’t move away after: she stares at Steve for a long time, and Steve is about to ask her what the matter is when she says, “She’s… Ms. Carter has been having some tough days.”

She must see how uneasy Steve gets, because she says, “She’s fine. She’s not unhappy or agitated. But—she’s been spending some time in the past. It’s common for this stage. I wouldn’t say anything, except… you’ll have to decide how to approach it, depending on when she thinks she is, and I thought you’d appreciate the heads up.”

Steve forces a smile onto his face, because being the bearer of difficult news is never pleasant, and like she said, she didn’t have to say anything. “I appreciate it—I’m so sorry, I don’t remember your name, Ms…? I’m usually better, but this place is a little on the big side.”

She smiles, much more genuinely than he’s doing, and suddenly it’s easy to return her warmth. “I’m Nurse Srnivasan, Captain Rogers. Sumita.”

She holds out her hand and he shakes it, asking her to call him Steve and committing her face and her kindness to memory.

Peggy’s room is lit by the glow of her bedside lamp: the rest of the space is in shadow, but the lamp lights up the book in her hands and the focused furrow of her brow. She looks up, and Steve knows her well enough to tell that she’s trying to hide her annoyance at being interrupted behind her polite smile.

“Yes?” she asks, without a trace of recognition on her face, and Steve swallows hard before settling himself against the windowsill by her bed, not quite far enough for a complete stranger but not near enough that she’ll think it’s peculiar, hopefully.

“Hi,” he says, finally, and though she doesn’t say anything he can read the impatience in her beautiful face. “I’m Steve. Rogers.”

“Hello, Steve,” she says. She picks up a card from the nightstand—it’s a picture of Steve, standing in front of the Middagh Street house and laughing, hands in his pockets; Bucky took it the day they closed on the house, before Steve could stop him, and printed a copy for Peggy—and sticks it in her book to mark her place. She looks down at the picture curiously before shifting her gaze to Steve: she looks uncertain, confused, but she doesn’t say it. 

“I’m—I was stationed at Camp Lehigh?” he says, trying to gauge how far back he should go, trying to find a middle ground that ensures he can tell her the truth, the way he always does.

“With Colonel Phillips?” she asks, her face clearing slightly, and Steve nods, probably a little more enthusiastically than is warranted.

“My friend took that picture,” he says, tilting his head toward her book. “And gave it to you, god knows why.”

He doesn’t know what she sees on his face or hears in his voice, but she smiles mischievously and asks, “Your ‘friend’?”

“Yeah,” he answers. He can feel himself blushing and he ducks his head to hide it as much as possible; she smiles even wider at him. “Bucky. James.”

A flash of something unusual crosses her face—comprehension, happiness for him, something like caution, which makes sense if she thinks they’re back in the war—and she says, “I see.”

Steve shrugs. “Yeah. I’m not sure what to feel about it either. Well, no. I’m happy. I’m just not sure what to do with that, I guess.”

She’s silent for a long moment, eyes roving over Steve’s face like she can read him as easily as she was reading the book. Finally, she says, “You look like someone who’s waited for happiness a long time.”

Steve’s throat constricts: even when she thinks he’s a stranger, she knows him, and it’s heartbreaking, somehow, her intelligence and her humanity, coupled with her current lack of awareness of how she’s changed his life over the years.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ve known Bucky since we were kids.”

“Since you were knee-high to a grasshopper?” she says, chuckling, and Steve looks up at her sharply. 

Phillips used to say that to him all the time, used to tell Steve that he was saving Phillips from generations of Southern clichés by making the expression true for the first time in the years that his family had been using it. 

Peggy must think the odd expression on Steve’s face means that he’s insulted, because she sobers quickly, eyes still dancing, and says, “Sorry; I don’t mean to poke fun. It can be hard, knowing someone a long time and then trying to get to know them in a different way.”

“Bucky’s waited for happiness a long time, too,” Steve says, carefully. “I don’t want to mess that up.”

She watches him in silence for another disconcertingly long beat before she says, “You know, I was going to be a schoolteacher.”

“What?” asks Steve, shocked into an honest-to-goodness jaw drop.

She laughs. “I know, I know. Hard to picture me having the patience to teach children their multiplication tables. But there was a man, the son of one of my father’s friends, and—he was a very pleasant sort, kind eyes, quick to smile. I was in my last year of school and he was headed to a vicarage in Somerset and the village school needed a teacher, and I thought… well, I told myself that there was no guarantee that the Special Air Service would have me, but if I went with him I could try to change the lives of every child that went through that school. I would be making a different sort of difference, is what I told myself. And he really was kind; I could imagine a thousand worse fates than being married to him.”

Steve can’t imagine what his face looks like, but it must be hilarious because her eyes crinkle as she watches him watch her.

“I was seventeen and looking down a long road full of obstacles and I was intimidated, and I don’t judge myself for that. I might have even made rather a good schoolteacher, and it’s an important job too, of course. Maybe more important than what I did, in the end. But I knew—I knew in the way the thought pulled at my chest when I imagined myself serving, I knew in the way I was terrified to fail—that I was meant to take the more intimidating road. That it would be worth it, even if the service decided they wouldn’t have me. Because that’s where I belonged.”

She shifts and reaches for a glass of water on her nightstand, and Steve jumps up and scurries to hand it to her. She thanks him quietly and sips from it before putting it back, and Steve settles into his usual armchair by her bed, hoping she won’t mind. “So I suppose the questions is, Steve, do you belong with this Bucky of yours?”

“Yes,” says Steve, not even having to think about it.

“Well,” she says. “There you are, then. All the best things in life are terrifying, Captain Rogers.”

She frowns a little, as if she can’t quite figure out where the title came from. Steve takes her hand in his and says, “Yes. You’re right. They are.”

“Do I know you?” she asks, quietly.

“Yes, you do,” he says. “You’re— I wouldn’t be who I am, without you.”

She nods. “I have this dreadful sense sometimes, you know, of being a visitor in my own life. But I look at the pictures in this room, I dig into whatever part of me hasn’t been worn away by time, and I get the sense that it was a good life.”

“It was,” Steve says, fervently. “It is. I promise you, Peggy.”

She strokes her other hand over his, clasping his fingers between hers. “I believe you, Steve. You make sure you live your life the same way, all right? And you bring that Bucky character to see me sometime. I know him, too, right?”

“Yeah, Peggy,” says Steve, smiling. “He thinks you’re terrifying.”

She smiles, pleased, and says, “Good. Now, let me tell you about this book I’m reading. You read, I assume? Well, of course you do, or we wouldn’t be friends. Maybe in the middle of remembering the plot I’ll remember you, and then we can really talk.”

Steve thinks of telling her that they’re really talking now, even if she can’t quite remember him, because she’s formidable that way. But she’s looking at him like she might not want to hear it, something vulnerable in the decisive way that she reaches for her book, so Steve only says, “Yep. I read. I actually think our friend Natasha gave you that book; she’s been after me to read it, too.”

“Well, I won’t tell her you cheated and asked me about it if you don’t,” says Peggy, and Steve slides further into the chair and listens to her talk.  
  
  
  
Two mornings later when Steve gets out of the shower he has a text from Sam, asking him to meet at Union Square in an hour to go running. They like to run down to and around Chinatown before stopping to eat as many dumplings as they can at a tiny place on Eldridge Street, though neither of them will say that’s what they’re up to until they’re right in front of the almost hidden storefront. Weaving through crowded New York City streets doesn’t really give Sam the chance to really work out, let alone Steve, so they both know what’s what when agree to meet at Union Square instead of at one of the parks or in one of the tower’s gyms. He doesn’t know why they don’t just agree to meet for dumplings.

Steve thinks about grabbing the A to 14th Street and walking over slowly to meet Sam, but when he steps out the door he starts jogging, and he’s in Fort Greene before he realizes where he’s headed. He texts Sam to adjust his ETA for dumplings and runs faster, heading toward the Williamsburg Bridge; he keeps his mind clear and his breathing even as he runs past the ramp for the bridge and keeps going toward the waterfront.

He’s there before he’s ready for it, so he runs right past the store and around the block. He thinks he sees Bucky glance up as Steve passes, but he doesn’t slow down enough to see if Bucky’s laughing at him. He slouches his way to the playground behind the store and hits the button on his phone that links him directly to Jarvis, hoping no one is going to call the police on him while he’s muttering into his phone next to a group of laughing children.

“Captain Rogers?” Jarvis answers, sounding slightly alarmed to hear from Steve. Tony would say that Jarvis doesn’t have the capacity to sound slightly alarmed, only to identify the low probability that Steve would be calling for a casual chat and to become correspondingly alert, but Steve calls bullshit. Jarvis sounds slightly alarmed.

“Jarvis,” says Steve. “Uh… could you… is there a menu for Bucky’s store on the internet somewhere?”

Jarvis’ amusement is palpable—fuck Tony, seriously—when he clarifies, “Do you mean flatwhite, Captain Rogers?”

“Yes,” Steve says. “I need… I’m going to order something in there.”

Jarvis says nothing. There are some vaguely electronic-sounding clicks that Steve guesses are supposed to signify that Jarvis is working, though Steve knows that Jarvis needs time to find something on the internet like the average person needs a kick in the gut. He’s probably using the time to record this for Tony.

“I can’t find a menu as such, Captain Rogers,” Jarvis says after the pause. “Though there is something called the Coffee Flavor Wheel on the website. Might I recommend avoiding anything that is empyreumatic, which is of course a sign of improper roasting.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Steve.

“Quite,” says Jarvis. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” says Steve, and he hangs up the phone and squares his shoulder and rounds the corner before letting himself think about it any more.

And old-fashioned copper bell jingles when Steve walks in, and Bucky glances up for a second, enough for Steve to know that Bucky saw him run past a minute ago. His mouth is quirked at the corner and he’s working on one side of the counter next to someone Steve assumes is Francesca, judging by the utter shapelessness of her vaguely Christmas-themed sweater. It’s July.

Steve hesitates for a second before joining the other line, where a man with an intricate neck tattoo is working the register next to a woman whose long-fingered hands are deftly pouring milk into mismatched ceramic cups. Bucky’s nose does that thing it does when he’s trying not to laugh.

Steve scours the chalkboard above the counter desperately, trying to find the most identifiable thing before he makes it to the register. It’s not busy, so he doesn’t have a lot of time. The board has a list of the store’s different roasts with some odd little drawings thrown in (Steve thinks someone might’ve been attempting to draw a dragon in the left-hand corner), and Steve has no idea if he wants to drink coffee with ‘floral and nutty notes’ or coffee ‘with a faint essence of durian’, let alone how he wants that coffee served.

He’s mostly made up his mind to go with floral and nutty and fake his way through the rest of it when the man behind the counter says, “Hello, happy to have you here at flatwhite. What can I get you?”

Nothing comes out when Steve opens his mouth. He’d kind of expected it, and he’ll take back every mean thing he’s ever thought about Bucky in ninety years if he just—

“He wants a cortado, Alistair,” says Bucky. He turns to Steve and says, “You had to join the line I’m not working? What is this, Sister Agnes’ time-out? Did you want me to pretend you weren’t here, or something?”

The guy—Alistair, Steve guesses—looks between the two of them before turning to Steve and saying, “That’ll be $3.95. Uh, can I… it’s Steve, right? For your order?”

Steve nods before digging his card out of the tiny inside pocket in the front of his sweatpants and obediently using his finger to sign on the tablet on the counter when he’s prompted. He gets out of the way and leans against the wall to wait for whatever he just ordered, and there’s a strange moment where everyone behind the counter is frozen until probably-Francesca whispers, “Dude, is that Captain America?”

Bucky’s three co-workers and the two other customers in the store turn to look at Steve.

“Yep,” Bucky says. He’s looking down at his coffee-making witch’s cauldron, pretending nothing is happening. “He’s a lot less cooler than advertised, I promise you. Jess, I’ll get his order if you get the flat white I was making for… Beth? Steve, sit your ass down; I’ll bring you your coffee.”

Steve tries to pretend there aren’t five people watching him intently—a skill he unfortunately had to perfect sometime around 1944—and slinks off to sit at the back of the store. He glances down at his phone in an attempt to look busy and sees a text from Sam: _hahahahahahahahahaha good luck ordering something when you get there HAHAHAHA. Ha._

“You never said you knew _Captain America_ , James, what the hell,” Francesca is saying. 

Steve watches them from the corner of his eye: he can see the instant when the penny drops. He hadn’t thought about what it might mean for Bucky to have Steve come here, hadn’t wondered if people might try to place Bucky’s oddly familiar features now that they have Steve for context, but Bucky had told him it was okay to come by, way back when, and Steve knows that the way Bucky’s mind works, he’d definitely thought about it before he issued the invitation.

At first, after Bucky had come home, Steve could never figure out how people walked past Bucky in the street every day without immediately realizing who he was. It was Bucky who reminded Steve that everyone thought he was dead, who told him that people don’t tend to go about their lives looking for the dearly departed. (“People don’t walk down the road looking for the dead, Steve,” Bucky had said; “I walked down the road looking for the dead,” Steve had countered; Bucky’s eyes had softened and he had said, “People walk down the road looking for _their_ dead. Not _the_ dead. And I’m not anyone else’s dead.”)

Even when they’re together, Bucky tells him, people are much more likely to think that Steve has creepily insinuated his way into the life of someone who looks like his long-dead best friend than they are to assume that Bucky _is_ his long-dead best friend. (“That’s if they even look at me, Rogers; you’re America’s golden hope, remember?”) That’s just the way people’s minds work; they look for the simplest explanation (“Unlike you Rogers; you pick at improbability like a scab”). And Steve has to admit it’s held somewhat true: Laura recognized Bucky immediately, probably because she was a kid when Bucky and Steve were in the newsreels, but the kids at the Middagh Street house had had to be told. Steve has begun to feel an uneasy confidence that they might be able to let the Bucky out of the bag at precisely the pace Bucky wants, and no faster.

Now, Bucky’s coworkers are looking between them like they can tell something is happening, but aren’t quite sure what; the two customers, who don’t have the benefit of knowing Bucky at all, are mostly focused on Steve. Steve gets the feeling Bucky might be able to talk his way out of it, once Steve leaves; whether Bucky wants to or not, Steve doesn’t know. This is one reason why avoiding Williamsburg had perhaps not been entirely misguided, but Steve knows better than to think he can go back to that. Or that Bucky—and Natasha, and Sam, and Peggy, and probably even Tony—wouldn’t do him bodily harm if he tried. 

“You never said you knew Captain America, James,” Francesca repeats as Steve watches Bucky finish making his coffee. Her voice is flatter this time, with an undertone of _we’re going to be talking later_.

“What are you so excited about, the man wears non-ironic khakis every day,” Bucky says, ducking under the opening in the counter. He doesn’t look away from Francesca, though, and he gives her a small nod. “And he irons creases into them.”

Francesca actually looks over at Steve with a considerably less enthused face than she had before Bucky said that, and Steve smiles down at his phone.

Bucky pulls a chair out at Steve’s table and sits down before placing a tiny glass in front of Steve: it’s filled with caramel-colored coffee, and there’s an intricate pattern on the top.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, under his breath.

“About what?” Bucky says, and his tone is so genuinely unconcerned that Steve is surprised into letting it lie.

“Uh… thanks,” he says, picking up the glass Bucky brought gingerly between his fingers.

“You remember how Dernier used to put some of our canned milk into that paint-stripper coffee he made?” Bucky asks, and Steve nods. “Same idea, less paint-stripper. It’s an espresso with a dash of milk.”

Steve takes a thoughtful sip; the coffee’s actually pretty floral and nutty, now that he knows to look for it, and the milk makes it smooth and creamy. He likes it.

“It’s good,” he says, and Bucky huffs a laugh out of his nose and rolls his eyes heavenward.

“So, what brings you to my place of employment?” Bucky asks.

Steve should have thought about what he would say if Bucky asked, but he was too busy learning about the fucking Coffee Flavor Wheel, so he didn’t really have a chance. He takes another sip of his coffee.

“I came to ask you on a date,” someone says.

Steve realizes it was him as Bucky’s eyebrows shoot up in amused delight and someone else—Francesca again, Steve thinks, though possibly it’s Beth the customer—says, “Oh. Em. _Gee_.”

“Like a… date-date?” Bucky asks, and when Steve nods awkwardly Bucky leans back in his chair, one long sprawling mess of confidence, and says, low enough that the others can’t hear again, “You gonna take me dancin’? I gotta warn you, I’m kind of a Ducky Shincracker, and I hear you’ve got two left feet.”

“You’re kind of a—” Steve remembers the expression, suddenly, has a vague sweet memory of Bucky teasing his sisters about using it, and he fights down the rush of affection so he can say, “You’re the fucking worst, I swear to God.”

Bucky laughs, throwing his head back like he means it, and says, “Hey, you’re the one who wants to take me on a date.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, just as happy as Bucky looks, all of a sudden. Their lives aren’t uncomplicated, but this, them giving each other shit—it can feel unpredictably easy, sometimes. “That’s me. Tomorrow okay? Pick you up at the tower for dinner?”

“I’ve got O’Hanahan at five,” Bucky says. “But sure, after that is good. I’ll make sure to wear a clean shirt and everything. Since we’re going on a _date_.”

Steve ignores the thought of all the teasing he’s going to be in for later and downs the last of his (really pretty great; he’s going to have to tell Sam) coffee. He says, “Sounds good. Sorry I can’t stay longer, but I told Sam I’d meet him in twenty minutes. I’m going to have to run across the bridge to make it to Union Square on time.”

Steve cuts a look at Bucky’s coworkers, then tries to ask Bucky, _You gonna be okay?_ with his eyebrows. _Get out of here, asshole_ , says the wave of Bucky’s hand, and then, quietly again, Bucky says, “It ain’t gonna be a secret forever, you know that. And some things are worth speeding that up.”

Steve smiles, unexpectedly shy with the pleasure of it.

“Go meet Sam at Union Square,” Bucky says, in his normal voice. “Don’t stuff your face too full of dumplings.”

“I’ll have you know we’re going for a run,” Steve answers, with as much dignity as he can.

“Sure,” Bucky says, easy. “Straight into a vat of dumplings.” 

And then, before Steve can articulate some kind of defense, Bucky stands up and leans down to kiss Steve on the mouth before heading back behind the counter.

“Fuck my life, this is the best day ever,” Francesca says, seemingly having forgotten whatever she had been mad about.

And Steve, who feels equally forgiving in the face of his deep contentment, has to agree.  
  


…

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I reject Tumblr as a platform because it doesn’t really allow for conversation, and this frustrates me deeply. I’ll probably get one eventually (read: tomorrow. Well, maybe. Actually, probably not. 
> 
> ...okay, fine. I gave in after two whole days. [It is here](http://singingkingoftheroad.tumblr.com), and I look forward to failing to use it.).
> 
> If you comment on here and are as bitter an old fandomer as I am I promise to do my best to recreate LJ-type conversation in the comments. Alternatively, I’m sigebeam AT gmail.com.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
